Johann asks:

[I’m running] an open table with three DMs. I was wondering about the information and knowledge players have and seek out. We ask one player to write kind of like a journal entry for the others, but only a very few dedicated people actually read these. The same goes for the wiki; only a few people look into this.

While we want to keep a low barrier to entry, we also think some information is critical for those players who return often, such as factions, their goals and issues, or rumors placed by us.

How do you handle this? Do you do kind of a recap at the beginning of the session?

Information flow in an open table is different from a dedicated table. In a dedicated table, the expectation is that all players will know everything that’s going on.

An open table is paradoxical because you’ll simultaneously have many more players than a dedicated table, but in many ways each individual player’s experience is more like a Campaign of One: There is no single, unified, overarching story of the group. Instead, each individual character is experiencing their own, individual story.

“How do I know what happened to Bill last session?” Well, either you were there or Bill told you or you asked Bill about it. That’s entirely about what the characters doing. As the GM, you don’t need to take on responsibility for any of that, beyond maybe giving the players a forum for communicating with each other away from the table (e.g., a Discord server or wiki). Either the players will share information with each other or they won’t. Either one is fine.

Other information, of course, will be more publicly known. I think of this as headline news. If somebody burns down the village church, for example, that’s something everybody in town is going to know about. Whether it was an NPC or a PC or a natural disaster that burned the church down, for this type of stuff I’ll prep a short, often bullet-pointed, bulletin and send it out to all of the players. The most effective method of distribution will depend on how you’re organizing your open table. For me:

• I’ll attach the headline news when I send out notices about upcoming sessions, which I’m currently doing via both e-mail and Discord.
• On my campaign status document, I’ll keep a list of recent headline news and review it at the beginning of each session. This might be the PCs literally reading newspapers, or it might just represent the “talk around town.” (In addition to the information itself, I find this is just a nice way to help kick things off and put the world in motion. It’s also a fun little reward when the players see something they’re personally responsible for crop up in the headlines.)

When you should cycle stuff off your Current Headlines list seems to be a bit more art than science, in my opinion. It depends partly on how vital/important the information is, how often people are playing, and also a general desire to not.

But it’s easy to imagine completely different options, too. You might actually write up the front page of a newspaper, for example, as something you can give as a handout or physically post in the game store where you’re playing. Or you could keep a list of headline news, but find more organic ways to weave it into your downtime procedures (rather than just reading out the list).

SCENARIO HOOKS

Of course, there’s also other types of information to be shared about the world. At the other extreme, you have scenario hooks, and this is where things can operate very differently at an open table.

For example, consider a treasure map revealing the location of the Temple of the Ancients. At a dedicated table, if a PC finds the treasure map, then they have it. At an open table, though, a player might find that map… and then literally never play again.

Under these conditions, the inverted Three Clue Rule breaks down due to information loss:

If the PCs have access to ANY three clues, they will reach at least ONE conclusion.

If you prep three leads pointing to the Temple of the Ancients, but then one of them exits the campaign, you’ve effectively broken the rule. In fact, it’s quite possible for all three leads to vanish! And even if they don’t, the rule can still break down due to the diffusion of players: The rule works partly through redundancy, partly through repetition, and partly because of what happens when the players combine multiple pieces of information together. But if each of your three clues is found by a different PC and those PCs rarely or never actually meet each other, the practical effect can be far closer to having just one clue three times over, rather than three clues reacting with each other and backing each other up.

Faced with this dilemma, it can be tempting to want to “liberate” the scenario hooks: Bill finds the treasure map, and the treasure map is added to some kind of group repository where any group can grab that lead and pursue it. (And you could imagine any number of diegetic explanations of this: For example, maybe all of the PCs are members of the Pathfinder Society or Delver’s Guild and are required to make full reports to the local branch office.)

Balanced against this, though, is the fact that secret knowledge is fun and all kinds of fun secondary and tertiary game play can emerge from it. (For example, maybe Bill offers to auction off the treasure map to the highest bidder. Or it motivates Bill to organize a secret expedition. Or someone else learns the map exists and tries to steal it from Bill. Some of the most memorable moments from my open tables involve players horse-trading information and getting excited when they get to reveal secrets to other PCs.)

Taking a step back, the broad situation here is that I have a scenario (e.g., the Temple of the Ancients) and I don’t want to just throw out all of that prep because the three clues pointing to that scenario randomly got misplaced in the dynamics of the open table.

There are generally some straightforward solutions for this:

• Include A LOT more leads pointing to the Temple of the Ancients. (And also track this stuff on a master revelation list, so that you can keep adding more clues if problems emerge.)
• Use a campaign structure that includes alternative methods for hooking scenarios. (For example, if the Temple of the Ancients is keyed to a hexcrawl, then even if the players miss all the clues, they could also just stumble across it via random exploration.)
• Build procedurally generated scenario hooks into your campaign structure. (For example, I’ve picked random hexes to restock rumor tables. Stuff like % tracks results for random encounters create similar effects.)

This isn’t to say that you should stop including clues and leads connecting adventures in your open table. This additional layer in the campaign creates different ways for the PCs to interact with the world, creating a far more dynamic and interesting situation. But it’s probably best to think of their effect as being far more localized than in a dedicated campaign: The primary effect is going to be to enhance and shape the experiences of individual characters, rather than being the primary backbone of the campaign as a whole.

THE OTHER STUFF

Somewhere between headline news that everyone hears about and individual nuggets of information like a treasure map that are accessed by specific individuals, there’s a potentially vast middle ground of stuff happening in the campaign world that the PCs might learn about.

A good example of this are faction downtime actions, as discussed in So You Want to Be a Game Master. The quick version is that you have a bunch of factions in the campaign world, they’re doing stuff, and the fallout from that stuff should be vectored so that it intersects the PCs.

(Rumors, job offers, and random encounters are typical examples of how this stuff can be vectored into the PCs. For example, a couple of gangs might have gotten into a turf war, and the PCs might hear about the gang violence or witness a gang shooting on the street or get hired by one of the gangs to assassinate the leader of the other gang or have one of their contacts get recruited by a gang.)

In a dedicated campaign, you can make a tick on a faction clock, figure out how to vector it into the PCs, and check it off your list: Job done! Good work!

If you do that at an open table, of course, the vector of the faction’s action will only intersect a tiny percentage of the players. Instead of sending shockwaves through the campaign, the faction’s actions are creating tiny little ripples.

To solve this you need to either escalate the faction’s action to headline news or you need to generate multiple vectors, likely keeping the faction action on your To Do list for three or four sessions so that multiple groups (and lots of players!) interact with the fallout.

THE SETTING LORE

A final consideration is bringing players up to speed on the campaign’s lore so that they can create their characters and understand what’s going on.

Here, again, I think you’ll find it most useful to think of the open campaign as many different solo campaigns. In other words, even at session fifty of the open table, a new player is effectively joining a brand new campaign. Imagine that you ran a dedicated campaign in Waterdeep and now you’re running a new campaign in Waterdeep with a completely different group of players: You would need to introduce these new players to the setting, but you wouldn’t spend a bunch of time talking about everything that happened in the previous campaign. The same thing is true of the open table.

Since you want quick character creation for an open table, I generally recommend having no more than a two-page handout and/or a five-minute spiel to orient a new player. In practice, I’ve found that I rarely need to update this. For example, in my Castle Blackmoor open table, the original introduction boiled down to: “There’s a castle and there’s a dungeon underneath it. Adventurers have been going down to explore its depths in the hopes of rescuing Baron Fant, who was kidnapped from the castle by monsters that emerged from the dungeons.”

Lots and lots of stuff happened within the dungeons, but this spiel was largely unaltered until it became common knowledge that Baron Fant had been transformed into a vampire. And even this was, obviously, a pretty minor adjustment: “Adventurers have been going down to explore its depths in pursuit of Baron Fant, who fled into the dungeons after being turned into a vampire.”

What you want to be cautious of is allowing more and more narrative to creep into your spiel. If my Castle Blackmoor campaign had continued, for example, you could imagine the spiel growing over time: “There’s a castle and there’s a dungeon underneath it. The campaign started when it was believed Baron Fant had been kidnapped by monsters that emerged from the dungeons, but it was later discovered that Baron Fant had actually been turned into a vampire and fled into the dungeons. He was later slain, but only after turning one of the adventurers who had gone after him. Lady Eilidh, as she became known, has withdrawn further into the depths of the dungeon, taking with her the vampiric remnants of the hobbit village that was also corrupted by the vampires. It’s currently pixie breeding season, diplomatic relations have been opened with a colony of werelions within the dungeon, and other expeditions continue apace.”

In reality, what I actually did was simplify my spiel: “There’s a castle and there’s a dungeon underneath it, which adventurers have been exploring.”

It wasn’t that current events weren’t relevant, but that information would organically flow to the player through

• the other players discussing which adventure they wanted to go on;
• the random rumors I rolled up for each new character; and
• the events of actual play (including headline news, as discussed above).

For similar reasons, having new players generally default to playing characters who are “new in town” (whatever that means for your particular open table) can be very useful. Even if a new PC isn’t actually new in town, thinking in that paradigm can still be a good way of identifying what information is truly essential.

It seems paradoxical, but often stripping down information a new player needs to process before they start playing can often help them not only get oriented faster, but also get them immersed into the lore faster (because they’ll start encountering it through play as a living experience as they build their own personal story).

Go to Ask the Alexandrian #1

Review Originally Published May 21st, 2001

With The Tide of Years Penumbra has gone from being one of the premiere D20 companies to being THE company producing D20 supplements – and I include Wizards of the Coast in that assessment. In The Tide of Years Penumbra not only introduces a new set of production values which are better than anything else in the D20 adventure market today, they apply them to a package which offers more material, of higher quality, than almost anything else in the D20 adventure market.

In short: This is good. This is very, very good.

PLOT

In the mists of antiquity there was a mighty empire: Lagueen. Lagueen was built upon the power of the Temporal Crystal, a powerful artifact which allowed the Priests of Ras’tan to unlock the secrets of time. From the ancient past and the distant future, Lagueen was able to harvest the greatest inventions and cultural treasures.

But Lagueen was brought low when a traitorous acolyte attempted to steal the Temporal Crystal. Although thwarted in her effort by a young priest named Jonar, the thief did succeed in activating the Temporal Crystal – transporting herself, Jonar, and the Crystal into the distant future. Unfortunately, without the Crystal, the marvelous society which had been created in Lagueen quickly fell apart. As their structures slowly collapsed from disuse and lack of repair, a landslide was triggered, blocking the end of the river valley in which Lagueen lay. “The river bloated and the valley floor flooded, covering the remains of Lagueen in a shroud of murky waters.” When the thief and priest reappeared, they found themselves at the bottom of an immense lake and quickly drowned.

Enter the PCs, who are, of course, passing through the forest which has grown up around the lake in which Lagueen has sunk. They are approached by the ghost of Jonar, who wants to set things right. The reappearance of the crystal has also triggered a temporal disturbance, slowly reverting the forest to a primeval state. Jonar will lead them through the valley to recover one of the temporal shards which the empire of Lagueen used in coordination with the Temporal Crystal to power their arcane technology. He will also introduce them to a local nixie, who will be able to grant them the ability to breathe underwater.

From here, of course, the PCs must journey beneath the lake – journeying to the sunken city of Lagueen, and (most importantly) the Temple of Ras’Tan in which the Temporal Crystal now lies. The temporal shard will unlock the temple’s ancient doors, but even once they’re inside the PCs will still need to deal with the ancient temporal traps laid in Lagueen’s golden age and the subterranean monsters which have taken up residence within the temple.

Once they reach the crystal, the PCs can return it to its proper place – just moments after the thief took it from Lagueen. This, of course, changes history, which can have one of two effects on the campaign world: First, the PCs’ actions may simply create an alternate dimension in which Lagueen never fell. On the other hand, the PCs may actually change their own world (the effect of this can be minimized by keeping Lagueen as a hidden kingdom, which has deliberately decided to keep its contact with the outside world to a minimum; or you can fully embrace the cataclysmic change).

STRENGTHS

Despite the critical success of their first adventure (Three Days to Kill) and their subsequent D20 products (Thieves in the Forest and In the Belly of the Beast), Atlas Games has not been content to simply rest on their laurels and repeat their past successes. Each new Penumbra product has improved upon the last, and each has taken pains to explore new territory. And this willingness to explore, experiment, and improve has ended up paying big dividends for Atlas Games – and, more importantly, the gamers who have followed their product line.

And with The Tide of Years they’ve raised the stakes one more time: The graphical look of the adventure is better than just about anything else being put out for D20 (and that includes Wizards of the Coast). The amount of material has been doubled over their previous efforts, and the quality of that material remains as high and innovative as ever – not only presenting the adventure itself, but (in the course of that adventure) providing a number of generic resources: New monsters (compsognathus, icthyosaur, monstrous aquatic spider, and time elemental), a new god (Ras’tan, God of Time), a new clerical domain (time), new cleric spells (detect temporal disturbance, dispel temporal effect, scry the ages, hastening of age, and wellspring of youth), new traps (temporal skids and temporal lags), a new magic item (the temporal shard), and the “lost empire” of Lagueen (which, like Deeptown in Three Days to Kill, is generic enough to be slipped into almost any generic fantasy campaign – while, at the same time, being unique and distinctive enough to be a memorable element of that campaign).

WEAKNESSES

The interior artwork, while of high quality, sometimes seems to be skewed from the text. For example, an underwater pyramid is shown – but it’s not the pyramid described in the text, and the characters swimming around it are wearing strange breathing apparatus which is not part of the adventure.

I would have also liked to see Nephew play a bit more upon her time travel theme. A forest returned to the primeval state, time traps, artifacts, and elementals are certainly more than sufficient – but I felt there was still a lot of territory left unexplored.

CONCLUSION

To put it succinctly: The Tide of Years delivers. Michelle A. Brown Nephew should be rightfully proud of her inaugural gaming product, and we should count ourselves lucky to have a company like Atlas Games producing adventures like this one.

Style: 4
Substance: 5

Authors: Michelle A. Brown Nephew
Company: Atlas Games
Line: Penumbra
Price: $10.95
ISBN: 1-887801-98-7
Production Code: AG3203
Pages: 48

While it’s nice that Michelle included a minimally disruptive option for the temporal restoration of Lagueen, I really respect an adventure that’s willing to go big — world-alteringly big! — with its potential consequences. It reminds me of Death Frost Doom, which is tonally almost completely opposed to The Tide of Years, but equally memorable.

The trick, of course, is being able to actually EARN the epic consequences. That can be a very fine line to walk.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

In this episode of the RPG series of the Game Design Round Table, hosts Dirk Knemeyer and David Heron are joined by Justin Alexander , a renowned game designer and thought leader in tabletop RPGs. Known for his influential essays and innovative GM techniques, Justin shares insights into the role of the Game Master as designer. They dive into how GMs can connect narrative ideas to mechanics, the philosophies behind crafting memorable RPG experiences, and the challenges new GMs often face. Whether you’re building worlds or running them, this episode offers practical tools and deep design wisdom.

Listen Now!

Go to Table of Contents

Beneath its charming exterior, the Eye of the East is a charnel horror of death and despair.

CAPTAIN MORSUL: Captain Morsul is a minotaur vampire, infected during a voyage through the Serpent’s Teeth. Use the stats for a vampire nightbringer (MM 2024, p. 316) with the following traits:

• Strength 18 (+4)
• Languages: Common, Abyssal
• Charge. If Morsul moves at least 10 feet straight toward a target and then hits with a gore attack on the same turn, the target takes an extra 9 (2d8) piercing damage. If the target is a creature, it must succeed on a DC 14 Strength saving throw or be pushed up to 10 feet away and knocked prone.
• Labyrinthine Recall. Morsul can perfectly recall any path he has traveled.
• Reckless. At the start of his turn, Morsul can gain advantage on all melee attack rolls he makes during that turn, but attack rolls against him have advantage until the start of his next turn.
• Multiattack. Captain Morsul makes one Bite attack, one Shadowstrike attack, and one Gore attack.
• Gore. Melee Attack Roll: +6 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 13 (2d8+4) piercing damage.

VAMPIRE SPAWN: There are 1d4+1 vampire spawn on the Eye of the East. (Morsul creates them from slaves and mutinous crew members, then has them periodically fight in survival-of-the-fittest deathmatches for the entertainment of the crew.)

SHIP MAP: Elven Tower’s Scorpion Ship battlemap. (Minor alterations.)

AREA 1 – MAIN DECK

A fairly typical, double-masted ship’s deck.

CARGO HATCH: A clever device allows a shutter, operable from below, to be drawn across the cargo hatches and cover the grating. (This is unusual, but can both hide the slaves in the cargo bay and protect the ship’s vampires from sunlight.)

AREA 2 – BALLISTAS

The upper deck ballistas are mounted on swivels.

SEARCH — DC 10 Wisdom (Perception): 6 of the bolts at each ballista tipped with alchemist’s fire.

ALCHEMIST’S FIRE BOLTS: 3d10 piercing damage. Target takes 1d10 fire damage at the start of each of their turns.

• GM Background: These bolts are sourced from the Alchemical Lab — Shadowworks.

AREA 3 – CREW QUARTERS

This compartment is filled with crisscrossing hammocks. Additional bed rolls are spread uncomfortably on the floor.

SECURE DOOR: The door to Area 5 is steel-cored and securely locked.

• AC 19, 40 hp, DC 18 Dexterity (Thieves’ Tools)

AREA 4 – STORAGE & CREW

Ship’s stores are kept here. Because Area 3 is too crowded for all of the crew to sleep there, several additional hammocks are also hung high here above the stores.

AREA 5 – SECURE HOLD

This compartment is used to store high-value or sensitive cargo. The ship’s anchor is also operated from here.

AREA 6 – VLADAAM MAGE’S QUARTERS

Makena, the Vladaam Mage assigned to the ship, keeps her quarters here. Their personal belongings include their spellbook, a potion of superior healing, and a djinni’s lamp.

HADIYA THE DJINN: The djinni in the lamp is Hadiya. Makena has come to consider Hadiya her best friend and will spend hours in her quarters just chatting with her. Hadiya, however, yearns for freedom from her imprisonment.

AREA 7 – CAPTAIN’S QUARTERS

The portholes of this aft cabin are draped with thick, black velvet curtains which have been securely fastened and block out all light. An everburning lamp is built into the desk and casts long, dancing shadows around the compartment.

BED: Concealed beneath the bed is a coffin of mahogany inlaid with jet (worth 3,000 gp).

DESK: On the desk is a box of red jade containing three onyxes each painted with a dragon’s head. (The box is worth 750 gp. Each onyx is worth 75 gp.) Also on the desk is a Letter from the Founder’s Guild to Captain Morsul (see handouts).

AREA 8 – SLAVE HOLD

Dozens of shackles are attached to the walls and to long metal bars running along the floor.

AREA 9 – VAMPIRE SPAWN QUARTERS

These rooms are used by the vampire spawn. The bedclothes are soiled and smeared with blood and filth.

Go to Part 16E: Slave Trade Handouts

T-Prime asks:

I really like your Roll Initiative Last video, but how could you use this with the alternative initiative checks from Pathfinder?

I often get asked questions like this. Here’s another one:

D. asks:

I’ve been using your Dice of Destiny system for years. It revolutionized my Vampire game! But now I see that you’re talking about D&D a lot. How does that work?

There’s also a more hostile variety where someone will, for example, see me talking about perception-type skill checks, and snarkily denounce me for “only playing playing D&D.”

This is, of course, hilarious. Ironically the angriest folk often seem to be those who have played D&D and literally one other RPG and have concluded that any points of difference between the two represents some fundamental divide between D&D and every other RPG in existence.

But the point is, of course, that RPGs do differ from each other. There are a lot of skills and techniques – particularly at the macro-level (like scenario structures) – that you can transfer from one game to another, but there are others that can’t survive the transition. This is particularly true when you get down in the trenches and are finessing how you handle individual action resolutions to best effect. (Consider, for example, Rulings in Practice: Sanity Checks, which is obviously only relevant in systems that have sanity check mechanics.)

So, for example, how can you use Roll Initiative Last in a system like Pathfinder where the initiative check made for each encounter will vary depending on how each encounter gets started (and what individual characters are doing)?

Well… you don’t. Compared to systems where you can Roll Initiative Last, those systems are trading a certain amount of efficiency for the benefit of more accurately modeling different types of encounters (and also likely encouraging players to explore different ways of initiating encounters).

Similarly, Technoir eschews initiative entirely. Instead, during a confrontation, the only rule is that everybody must take an action before anyone is allowed to take a second action, and the order in which those actions are taken is left up to the discretion of the GM. Here, again, efficiency is sacrificed, but with the benefit of both flexibility and seamless action scene transitions.

In the Infinity RPG, on the other hand, the PCs always go first, but the GM can “steal initiative” by spending Heat points. Here the system essentially “bakes in” the benefits of Roll Initiative Last (since you can launch straight into any encounter without pausing for initiative rolls), but instead of Technoir’s completely open flexibility, it plugs the whole thing into fueling the Momentum & Heat economy that’s a core pillar of the game.

Are these trade-offs worth it? That’s ultimately up to you and your group. (And what’s right for one game won’t necessarily be right for another.)

Of course, these other systems will also have expert-level techniques that can’t be used in D&D. For example, in games like Technoir and Infinity where you need to be able to answer the question, “Who hasn’t gone yet this round?”, it’s usually a good idea to keep a list of combatants and check them off as they each take their actions. In a system that uses hot-potato initiative (where, at the end of their turn, each player decides which character is going to take their turn next), it becomes essential to figure out how to make sure everyone at the table has access to this information.

(And that’s an example of a trade-off I don’t like: The extra bookkeeping necessary to make sure everyone knows who’s going to next, plus the extra decision points, plus the analysis paralysis from not being able to plan your turn ahead of time creates a huge drag in actual play and is just not worth whatever marginal benefits the hot-potato initiative is supposedly providing.)

ADAPTING TECHNIQUES

Sometimes, though, a technique that doesn’t work in a new system can be adapted so that it does.

For example, let’s go back to Pathfinder initiative checks. You can’t pre-roll initiative at the end of each encounter because you can’t be certain which type of initiative check each character will be making.

Could you just have everyone pre-roll every type of initiative check and then just use the appropriate set of checks? Probably not. Even if you limited this to just the most common initiative checks (Perception, Stealth, etc.), the extra hassle of collecting all that info and the time spent on wasted rolls probably isn’t worth it. Plus, you’ll still need to sort those variable results into the final initiative order.

Maybe you could use secret rolling to achieve a similar effect? You’ll need to be on your toes, but if you’re good at multitasking you might be able to get all those initiative checks made when it becomes clear a fight is about to happen but before things actually kick off. The trick, of course, is that this is no longer easy to pull off, and you might run into problems with players who don’t like losing the illusory sense of “agency” that comes with rolling their own dice.

Digital tools might help, though. You could imagine one that lets you very quickly select the appropriate skill for each combatant and then click a single button that would roll and organize the entire initiative order for you.

Alternatively, you can actually tweak the mechanics to achieve a desired effect or efficiency.

As an extreme example, you could just drop the entire concept of alternative initiative checks and go back to having just one type of initiative check. (You’d do this if the trade-off of efficiency for modeling different encounter approaches wasn’t worth it to you.)

As a less extreme example, you might learn that your group is overwhelmingly likely to make initiative checks of a particular type. (Probably Perception-based initiative.) So now you can have everyone Roll Initiative Last with that check type, but rule that if an alternative approach is taken (Stealth, for example), then a new roll will be made and supersede the pre-roll.

Would that work? Maybe. But in some groups you might discover that this creates some weird metagaming. (“I’d sneak up on them, but then I’d lose that great Perception initiative check I made!”) You could combat that with secret checks (but now with easier bookkeeping!).

Or you could lean into it by instead ruling that the new initiative check will only supersede the original check if it’s better than the original check. This would, in turn, encourage players to always find an alternative approach to initiating encounters than whatever the default approach is. Is that desirable? That’s a question only you and your group can answer.

FINESSE TECHNIQUES

Taking a slightly broader view here, a lot of what we’re talking about here are finesse techniques: These are the subtle little differences in how we use, interpret, present, implement, and execute the mechanics of an RPG. (And also non-mechanical interactions!)

These techniques can have a huge impact on the quality of a game session, but a surprisingly small amount of GMing advice talks about this stuff. Perhaps this is because such techniques can be so situational in their use. Whatever the case may be, I think you can reap huge rewards by making a point of really thinking not just about the rules you’re using, but how you’re using them.

For another example of finesse techniques, check out Random GM Tips: The Numbers That We Say.

Go to Ask the Alexandrian #1