It’s nice to talk to the Dungeon Master of None Crew about something more positive than the OGL fiasco. It’s so amazing to have the opportunity to chat with different people about the upcoming release of So You Want to Be a Game Master! It’s a great reminder that there are many different ways to become a Game Master, many different ways to be a Game Master, and many different reasons for opening the door to adventure. Every one of these conversations reveals more about what this book can be and what it will mean to people around the world, whether they’re first-time GMs or long-time masters of their art.

Justin Alexander of the Alexandrian joins Matt and Rob to talk about his upcoming book and about what he’s learned in his many years of GMing! Get a sneak peek of So You Want to be a Game Master and hear some PRO TIPS for your games!

Listen Now!

You can find links to my previous appearance on Dungeon Master of None at the Alexandrian Auxiliary.

GM: The blue-skinned humanoids approach and begin speaking in a fluted, lyrical tongue. Anyone speak Avariel?

(much shuffling of papers)

Rashid: Nope.

Sara: I’ve got Sindarin, Carcinan, and Ashkaral. That’s not the same thing, is it?

GM: I’m afraid not.

Whether you’re playing a fantasy, science fiction, or historical campaign, it’s not unlikely that PCs — who often go roaming far and wide — will end up running into a language barrier or three. Some GMs may choose to handwave this away, perhaps even invoking some diegetic device like a universal translator to justify the wave.

Language barriers, however, can also be fun: They create an unexpected challenge, and can often force the players to come up with creative solutions to work around them. In the real world, one way people work around language barriers is by using a pidgin — a simplified form of communication featuring a limited vocabulary.

BASIC PIDGIN

To establish a pidgin in your RPG of choice, have the PC make a Language skill check.

The margin of success on this check establishes how many words the PCs and the other language speakers can establish in common. In practice, treat this as a pool of points: The player can spend one point from the pool each time they want to use a new word. The words they’ve used to far should be listed, and they can use the established words (or new words purchased from the pool) however they want in an effort to communicate.

This works best in systems that will generate a margin of success roughly between 1 and 20.

• If you’re using a percentile system or some other system that generates high margins of success, you’ll likely want to divide the margin of success to establish the pidgin pool.
• If you’re using a success-counting system, decide how many pidgin pool points are created by each success rolled.

The NPCs are generally limited to the same pool of words which has been “unlocked” by the player, although the GM may choose to introduce additional words if they so choose. (These additional words will also be available to the PC going forward.)

Tip: The GM is also encouraged to include literal words from the unknown language in the NPCs’ speech. Clever players may be able to figure out what these words mean and be able to start using them without paying points from their pidgin pool.

ADVANCED PIDGIN

Here are some optional/advanced rules that you might use in combination with the basic pidgin rules at your discretion.

RELATED LANGUAGES: In the real world, it’s easier to establish a pidgin if you know a language that’s more closely related to the one you’re attempting to communicate in. (For example, the Romance languages are all more closely related to each other than any of them are to Japanese.)

If you have an established language tree, you could apply a penalty for each step of difference between the closest known language and the target language. (Or impose disadvantage beyond a certain threshold.) If you don’t have a language tree, this might be a great opportunity to start one! Alternatively, you can just make a call with your guy about whether or not the languages are Closely Related (bonus or advantage), Related (normal check), or Distant (penalty or disadvantage).

EXPANDING YOUR PIDGIN: Each successful conversation the PC manages to have in the pidgin can grant them the opportunity for a new check to add more points to their pidgin pool. What constitutes a successful conversation (i.e., did you successfully communicate what you wanted and did you understand what they wanted?) is determined by the GM.

FROM PIDGIN TO FLUENCY: Some RPGs are smart enough to include a mechanism by which PCs can learn a new language. If so, then the player can choose to transition from pidgin to fluency by simply spending the appropriate skill points, selecting the appropriate perk, or whatever that mechanism might be.

If your RPG of choice doesn’t feature such a mechanism for some reason, you might consider setting a progress clock at the same time that the pidgin pool is established. You could then use downtime actions (as described in detail in So You Want to Be a Game Master) to fill the progress clock; or perhaps successful conversations could similarly fill the clock (while conversations that go awry would do the opposite). When the clock is filled, the character becomes fluent in the target language.

Alternatively, the first time you fill the progress clock, the character becomes fluent enough to make social checks with a penalty or disadvantage. You can then set up a second progress clock, which can determine when full fluency has been achieved and the penalty/disadvantage can be dropped.

The original 5^th Edition D&D Starter Set was released in 2014, reaching shelves shortly before the core rulebooks.

In 2019, Wizards of the Coast released a new introductory boxed set: The D&D Essentials Kit.

Your first thought might be that they were replacing the Starter Set with a new and improved game box, but this wasn’t the case: The Starter Set remained in print and on shelves next to the Essentials Kit until early 2022, when it was replaced by the new D&D Starter Set: Dragons of Stormwreck Isle.

(Along the way, Wizards also published additional starter sets featuring Stranger Things and Rick & Morty.)

So why do we have so many introductory boxed sets?

I suspect it has less to do with what’s inside the box and more to do with the box existing in the first place.

In the mass market and big box stores, entertainment products have a shelf life: If you’re successful enough to crack that market in the first place, your game will be stocked, it will sell, and then at some point the big box stores will stop stocking the game and the sales will stop. If you’re lucky, this will be based on your sales (because if you can keep selling, then you can keep selling), but more often it’s just a matter of time: Automated reorder systems will play it safe by ordering fewer copies each time; which results in fewer sales; which results in a smaller reorder or, eventually, no reorder at all.

By having multiple introductory boxed sets for sale, Wizards of the Coast pays a cost in customer confusion: Someone wanting to play D&D for the first time may become uncertain which of these nigh-identical products they should buy.

But what they gain is a new SKU; a new product code. Each time they release a new SKU, it’s a fresh opportunity for their marketing team to go back to the big box stores that have dropped the previous boxed set and get D&D back on the shelf in Target or Walmart or Barnes & Noble.

If you’re reading this review, though, you’re probably not an account manager at Walmart. (If you are, there’s a book you should definitely acquire.) You’re a gamer. Or maybe a search engine brought you here because you’re interested in becoming a D&D player.

So if you’re looking for your own introduction to D&D, is the Essentials Kit what you should pick up? Is it worth grabbing a copy if you already own the D&D Starter Set? What if you already own the core rulebooks?

This review will probably make more sense if you’re familiar with my review of the D&D Starter Set, so you might want to read that if you haven’t already. But here’s a quick overview of what I’m looking for in an introductory boxed set like the Essentials Kit:

• A meaty, full-featured version of D&D.
• An introduction for complete neophytes to roleplaying games that would not only teach them how to play, but how to be a Dungeon Master.
• A complete gaming experience, even if you never picked up the Player’s Handbook or Dungeon Master’s Guide.

OPENING THE BOX

So let’s take a peek inside the D&D Essentials Kit.

Where the D&D Starter Set was fairly barebones, the Essentials Kit packs in a bunch of gimmicks and gewgaws to fill the box:

• The 64-page Essentials Kit Rulebook, doubling the size of the 32-page rulebook from the D&D Starter Set. (Notably absent, however, is the index that the D&D Starter Set included.)
• The 64-page Dragon of Icespire Peak, which serves as an adventure book and monster manual.
• Six blank character sheets.
• A full set of dice.
• A two-sided poster map of Phandlin and a hexmap of the surrounding area.
• A mini-DM screen.
• 108 cards on perforated sheets, including initiative cards, quest cards, an oddly arbitrary selection of NPCs, magic items, and conditions.
• A cardboard tuck box for your cards.

Notably, both the rulebook and the adventure book have been given cardstock covers, replacing the flimsy pamphlets from the D&D Starter Set with books that can actually endure some meaningful use at the table. This was a shortcoming I called out in my review of the Starter Set, and it’s great to see it improved here. Along similar lines, the dice set in the Essentials Kit is larger, including the second d20 (for advantage/disadvantage rolls) and 4d6 whose absence I’d noted.

I’d also mentioned that a poster map of the region around Phandalin would have been a great addition to the D&D Starter Set… and here it is! Including a mini-DM screen is also an inspired choice, not only giving the game a little more “table presence” when you get set up for play, but also giving the new DM a valuable cheat sheet that will help them master the game.

I’m a little more agnostic leaning towards pessimistic when it comes to the cards. There’s a mishmash of stuff here:

• Condition cards.
• Initiative count cards.
• Sidekick cards.
• Quest cards.
• Magic items.

I find the basic utility for quite a few of these cards fairly suspect, and while I respect the quixotic quest to include “value-add” components to introductory boxed sets down through the ages, I think it mostly sets up a false expectation of what you “need” to run a D&D adventure.

(You do not, in fact, need to prep quest cards or NPC cards.)

Your mileage may vary.

RULEBOOK v. RULEBOOK

Before opening the Essentials Kit box, I was actually expecting to find the exact same rulebook that Wizards of the Coast had used in the D&D Starter Set. The rules of the game, after all, hadn’t changed.

Instead, the Essentials Kit Rulebook has doubled in size, from 32 pages to 64 pages!

There are several reasons for this, but the biggest one is that the Essentials Kit Rulebook includes character creation! Which was another thing I thought was missing from the D&D Starter Kit! This is fabulous!

But there are a couple things that could have made it even better. First, the ideal introductory boxed set would include both character creation rules and pregen characters. Character creation gives you a fully functional game, while pregens let new players leap directly into the action.

Second, if you’re going to have a bunch of these introductory boxed sets in print at the same time, I’d love to see them go a little wild with the class/race selections. If the D&D Starter Set features human/dwarf/elf and fighter/cleric/rogue/wizard, I’d have loved to see the Essentials Kit feature something like dragonborn/gnome/half-orc/tiefling and druid/monk/ranger/warlock. Mix it up! Instead, the selection here is pretty tame (although they do toss bards into the mix).

Another major addition here are rules for Sidekicks. This is a very smart addition, because it lets a DM easily run the game for a single player (playing a PC plus sidekick). That’s huge for an introductory boxed set, because it makes it a lot easier for a new player looking to play D&D for the first time to start playing.

It’s interesting looking through the two rulebooks side by side and seeing how the sequencing of information shifts subtly from one to the other, but for the most part everything seems to be pretty equivalent. (With the exception of experience points, which have been removed from the Essentials Kit.)

There are a couple other bits of rules-type content that don’t technically appear in the Essentials Kit Rulebook, but which I want to comment on here: Monsters appear as an appendix in the adventure book and magic items have been moved onto the item cards.

The monsters are given better descriptions in the Essentials Kit than in the Starter Set, but I found the selection of both monsters and magic items disappointing. There’s not really a way for me to objectively demonstrate this, but looking at the Starter Set I felt like I could take the included magic items and monsters and remix them to create a bunch of different adventures. But with the Essentials Kit, I just… don’t. It feels like there’s a lack of variety, or that key niches have been left unaddressed.

So the inclusion of character creation is a major upgrade for me, but overall I think, from a mechanics standpoint, that the Essentials Kit is something of a mixed bag for me. But I think it has a slight edge over the Starter Set here.

DRAGON OF ICESPIRE PEAK

The Essentials Kit includes an all-new adventure book: Dragon of Icespire Peak.

Like the Lost Mine of Phandelver from the D&D Starter Set, however, Dragon of Icespire Peak is set in the village of Phandalin.

In fact, at first glance, Dragons of Icespire Peak is structurally very similar to Lost Mine of Phandelver: You’ve got a bunch of individual adventures, forming a complete Tier 1 campaign. You don’t need to complete these adventures in any particular order, with the PCs being able to gather adventure hooks in the hub of Phandalin and then choose which ones they want to pursue. The whole thing ultimately culminates in a cap adventure where the PCs hunt down the titular dragon that’s plaguing the region.

So this should be just as good as Lost Mine of Phandelver, right?

… right?

I’m not going to beat around the bush here: It’s not.

Dragon of Icespire Speak gets off on the wrong foot, in my opinion, from the very beginning by giving some absolutely terrible advice to the first-time DM: Instead of reading the adventure book ahead of time, the DM is instructed to wait until the players are creating their characters and then “read ahead” to figure out how the adventure works.

(This is despite the fact that, on the same page, the DM is told that part of their role is to help the players create their characters. So… yeah. Do that and also read the adventure for the first time. At the same time.)

I think what they’re trying to do is support people who want to open the box and immediately play the game: They’d obviously have to claw out some time during the session to read the adventure, right? Realistically speaking, however, this is never going to happen: There’s a 64-page rulebook that needs to be digested before play can begin. So all you’re left with is some terrible guidance that will lead new DMs straight into an almost certainly horrific first-time experience at the gaming table.

This is particularly true because Dragon of Icespire Peak isn’t designed with a single initial scenario. Instead, the campaign begins with the PCs standing in front of a jobs board posted outside the townmaster’s hall, where they’ll immediately be able to choose between three different adventures. (Read fast, Dungeon Master!)

This jobs board is, in fact, the primary structural problem I have with Dragon of Icespire Peak. Unlike Lost Mine of Phandelver, in which the adventures were all connected to each other and emerged organically from interactions with the game world, Dragon of Icespire Peak primarily delivers Quests by having the DM hand the players a Quest Card when they read the Quest on Harbin Wester’s job board.

The result is an experience which has been video-gamified.

To be clear here, I don’t have an inherent problem with using a jobs board in D&D. The problem here is the implementation.

To start with, for many of the Quests there’s no clear mechanism by which Harbin Wester could have become aware of them. In other cases, the continuity doesn’t make sense. For example, there’s one quest where the PCs are sent to check on a ranch that was attacked by orcs:

• Orcs attacked the ranch. Almost everyone there was killed.
• “Big Al” Kalazorn, the ranch owner, was captured.
• A ranch hand escaped and rode to Phandalin.
• Harbin Wester then waited ten days before sending the PCs to see if Kalazorn is still alive.

In addition to frequently not making any sense, these quests are all disconnected from the world around them. In fact, the adventure frequently seems to go out of its way to eschew these connections!

For example, there’s a wilderness encounter in which the PCs stumble across an unattended riding horse branded with BAK (for “Big Al” Kalazorn). That’s good! That’s a clue that something is wrong at Big Al’s ranch and the PCs could follow that lead and discover the adventure in a way that makes the world feel like a real place!

… except that encounter is hardcoded so that it ONLY occurs if the PCs are already on their way to the Big Al’s ranch.

This lack of continuity, context, and connection, combined with the fact they’re delivered in the most impersonal manner possible (Harbin literally hides inside his house and won’t let them in), makes all of the Quests feel like meaningless errands, something which I feel is only further emphasized by the adventure using quest-based leveling. These are not things that the players will actually care about; they are rote obligations.

A subtler difference is that Dragon of Icespire Peak’s Quests are filled with a lot of Thou Must imprecations as opposed to Lost Mine of Phandelver’s presentation of options and tacit support for open-ended play driven by the players.

On a similar note, a lot of the goals in Dragon of Icespire Peak default back to “clear the dungeon.” This, too, greatly reduces the players’ ability to creatively engage the campaign and forge their own destiny… which once again gives the sensation of trudging through obligations.

I also have a much longer list of specific concerns when it comes to the individual adventures in Dragon of Icespire Peak. Stuff like:

• There’s a 60-foot-long tunnel. If the PCs don’t declare that they’re searching for traps, the tunnel collapses when they reach the half-way point and everyone in the tunnel (which, given the length of the tunnel, is likely to be all of the PCs) is automatically buried. If you’re buried, you cannot take any actions and the only way to escape is if someone who isn’t buried helps you get out. So… yeah. That’s just an instant death trap. (And there are a bunch of other death-trap issues in this vein, like the adventure that dumps 1^st-level PCs run by neophyte players into multiple fights with ochre jellies.)
• There’s an adventure where a gnomish king has been driven insane by the knowledge that a mimic is eating his subjects. Okay… sure. But as soon as the PCs kill the mimic, the king’s insanity is instantly cured! … that is not how madness works. (Fundamental breakdowns in worldbuilding, character, and basic logic are far too frequent here.)
• That same adventure, however, has a lot of really neat ideas and interesting roleplaying opportunities. It’s fairly complicated and relatively difficult for a DM to run. Which would be okay… unless you position it so that it can be the very first adventure a brand new DM using the Essentials Kit would need to run. Which is, of course, exactly what the adventure book does. Why not scale this adventure up a couple levels so that it can come in the middle of the campaign after the DM has a bit more experience under their belt? (There’s a number of strange sequencing decisions like this.)

Dragon of Icespire Peak is, ultimately, a mediocre but passable campaign. In comparison to many other introductory adventures, it’s actually quite good. But when directly compared to Lost Mine of Phandelver — and, of course, one is more or less compelled to make that comparison — it does not fare well.

THE VERDICT

In the showdown between the D&D Starter Set and the D&D Essentials Kit, which one comes out on top?

With the D&D Starter Set out of print, of course, this is something of a moot point. The Essentials Kit wins more or less by default.

Even when both were available, however, it’s hard to pick a clear winner. I’d probably give the edge to the D&D Starter Set strictly on the strength of Lost Mine of Phandelver: In large part, an RPG lives or dies by its adventures, and Lost Mine of Phandelver is just a fundamentally better campaign.

The truth, though, is that if you were to merge these two sets together, you’d likely end up with a near-perfect starter set in the fusion: Give me the rulebook from the Essentials Kit. Give me the campaign from the Starter Set.

More than that, though, when we start talking about combining the Essentials Kit with the Starter Set, we suddenly discover that Dragon of Icespire Peak suddenly becomes vastly better simply by running it at the same time you’re running Lost Mine of Phandelver. (Which is, of course, quite trivial to do.)

Having the impersonal, decontextualized jobs board as the central pillar of your campaign is alienating and results in a shallow, forgettable, and even frustrating experience for the players. But if you take that same structure and add it as a spice to a larger campaign, suddenly it comes to life! The roots of Lost Mine of Phandelver will dig in, twining themselves around the adventures of Dragon of Icespire Peak, lending them the context and depth that they natively lack.

(I suspect this also means that the D&D Essentials Kit is a perfect companion to the Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk campaign, which remixes the material from Lost Mine of Phandelver, although I haven’t read that book yet.)

Of course, in actual practice, I’d still recommend that you’d be best served by make a number of small tweaks and modifications to contextualize, connect, and make relevant these adventures. (You could use Lost Mine of Phandelver as a model of how to do that, or check out articles like Using Revelation Lists.)

In the final analysis, the D&D Essentials Kit is a pretty solid introductory boxed set. I wish it was a little better, but I wouldn’t really hesitate giving it as a gift to someone discovering D&D for the first time. And at just $25, it’s not hard to justify grabbing a copy to supplement your Lost Mine of Phandelver, Phandelver and Below, or almost any Tier 1 campaign based out of a typical fantasy village.

Grade: B-

Rulebook Designer: Jeremy Crawford
Adventure Designer: Christopher Perkins
Additional Adventure Design: Richard Baker
Adventure Development: Ben Petrisor

Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Cost: $24.95
Page Count: 128

FURTHER READING
Review: D&D Starter Set (2014)
Review: Dragons of Storm Wreck Isle (2022 Starter Set)

Buy Now!

Back in 2012, I was chatting with a guy online who claimed that, by the year 2017, computer games would exist which would allow GMs to create off-the-cuff in real-time just like they can currently improvise at the gaming table.

And I said, “Bullshit,” for what is probably obvious reasons to most of you, but nevertheless baffle people who seem to think that the special effects in MCU movies are created by someone saying, “Show Captain America punching Thanos with Thor’s hammer” and then thirty seconds later having a fully rendered shot pop out of the computer.

(Short version: That’s not how that works. And the difficulty of generating a fully interactive version of the scene properly rigged and optimized for a computer game engine would be at least an order of magnitude higher, probably more.)

In the process of calling bullshit, however, I ended up creating an example of off-the-cuff design in a tabletop RPG that would be virtually impossible to replicate in a computer game engine even with procedural content generators vastly superior to anything we have available to us today. (And even moreso in 2012 or 2017.)

It was nothing particularly spectacular, but there were a few touches of the fantastical that I think are rather evocative and worth sharing, and so I did that here on the Alexandrian back in 2014.

But here’s the thing: We’re definitely closer to that future now than we were in 2012 or 2014.

(I mean, that’s tautological. But you know what I mean.)

So I thought it might be fun to take the descriptions from the Valley of the Sapphire Waves and see what images are conjured forth by Midjourney.

My methodology here is relatively simple: I input a prompt using more or less the words from the original write-up of the Valley. Midjourney will then generate four images, and I’ll select whichever one I think is best. (“Best,” of course, is subjective, but it will be some combination of accurate, evocative, beautiful, and useful. Basically, it will be the image I would select if I was looking for a visual handout to use while GMing.)

I don’t know what the results will be. (I suspect “surprisingly good, but not great,” but we’ll see.) And, of course, no matter how immaculate the result is, we’ll still be miles away from running a game for my friends in a computer game engine and getting the computer to pop out this entire valley (or even just these specific locations) in a seamlessly playable form in the less than five minutes it took me to originally improvise for table use.

VALLEY OF THE SAPPHIRE WAVES

The Valley of the Sapphire Waves is filled with rolling fields of vibrant blue grass. Anyone standing in the waters of the valley will perceive the sun as eclipsed because Helios mourns the loss of his first wife (the Ur-Goddess of the Rivers, see hex 1).

HEX 1

The Falls of the Ur-Goddess. The 300 foot tall waterfall at the end of the valley flows up because it is the place where the Ur-Goddess of the Rivers was slain millennia ago.

HEX 2

Obelisk of Moonstone. Raised as a holy site by the Heresy Cult of the Ur-Goddess. The moonstone will heal anyone touching it at night, but under the rays of the sun it is cursed. (Anyone touching it suffers as per a bestow curse spell.)

HEX 3

The Stirge Mires. 1 in 3 chance of encounteing 1-6 stirges.

HEX 4

Goblin Moonstone Scavengers. Small tribe of goblins scavenging the moonstones scattered in rocky crevasses here.

HEX 5

Vale of the Dryad. This forestland is protected by a dryad whose spirit is bound to a treant. All the squirrels here can talk, many spontaneously forming acting troupes performing A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

HEX 6

Graveyard of the Moonstone Cults. 1 in 3 chance per turn of encountering 1-3 wights.

HEX 7

Medusa’s Vale. A medusa makes her home in the Sinkhole of Statuary.

HEX 8

Sphinx Guardians. Once a great tribe of sphinxes guarded the entrance to the valley (they were placed there by Helios), but their numbers are depleted. 1 in 3 chance of encountering a sphinx, which 75% of the time will be an undead skeleton. Remaining sphinxes will ask sun-oriented riddles before attacking.

POST MORTEM

I’m not entirely certain Midjourney knows what a sphinx is. (Or, at the very least, “sphinx skeleton” leaves it in a tizzy.)

The most accurate image is probably of the squirrels performing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (The Falls of the Ur-Goddess aren’t bad, but they’re definitely not flowing upwards.)

I like Helios rising to eclipse the sun, but for me the most compelling image is probably of the Medusa’s sinkhole. Ironically, this is also (with the possible exception of the undead sphinxes) the most inaccurate of the images. But I am deeply intrigued by the creatures crawling around her.

From a practical standpoint, the whole process of generating images took me forty-five minutes to complete. So we’ve obviously still got a long way to go here.

It’ll be interesting to see what things look like if we check back in on this in another decade. (Or three.)

As we all know, RPGs are not movies and the Principle of Using Linear Mediums as RPG Examples reminds us that there are fundamental differences between the books, movies, TV shows, and graphic novels we love and the fundamentally interactive medium of the roleplaying game.

(Or, at least, there should be.)

Nonetheless, who among us hasn’t dreamed of playing through our favorite stories? Of actually experiencing an adventure that we’ve seen or read? Or maybe we’re just GMs with a session to prep and a desperate need to find some quick and easy inspiration. Either way, what would it mean to take a traditional, linear story and adapt it to your gaming table?

ADAPTING CHARACTERS

Let’s start with the relatively easy proposition of bringing your favorite character to the gaming table: Luke Skywalker. Lara Croft. Sherlock Holmes. Sister Frevisse. Oedipus. Whoever has captured your imagination.

To start, you’ll want to identify the precise version of the character you want to play: The Luke Skywalker who was living with his aunt and uncle on a moisture farm is a very different character from the one who confronted the Emperor on the second Death Star. Other characters will literally exist in multiple versions, drawn from different myths or continuities.

(Actually, upon reflection, that’s also true of Luke Skywalker.)

On a similar note, rather than capturing an existing vision of a character, you might actually set out to create your own variation of the character: Out of all the Batgirls which have existed, you’re creating your own unique gestalt Batgirl.

(You can do this even with characters who currently exist in only one canonical form.)

In practice, this will quickly become true in any case, because it’s of vital importance to recognize that your character’s destiny from the medium you’re adapting them from does not exist: From whatever point in their personal continuity you may be drawing them, once they’ve been injected into the gaming table, their future is unwritten. Maybe your Luke Skywalker falls to the Dark Side (or never becomes a Jedi at all). Maybe your Sherlock Holmes never meets Moriarty. You’re playing to find out.

ADAPTING PLOT

Now let’s swap to the Game Master’s side of the table.

Obviously we don’t want to prep a plot, so the first thing we’ll want to do is get rid of the plot from our source material.

Step 1: Remove the main characters and every action they take.

Step 2: What you’ll be left with is a situation. Identify the best structure for modeling the situation. (A node-based structure will probably work 4 times out of 5.)

Step 3: The original story had a hook for getting the characters involved. Re-hook it for your PCs. (In some cases you’ll be able to use the same hook that the film/book did. But often you’ll get better results customizing the hook to your PCs.)

Unsurprisingly, this looks a lot like how I rebuild railroaded adventures, as described in How to Remix an Adventure. (And you can check out that essay for some specific details of how to identify and implement various scenario structures.)

A place where this can get tricky is that a lot of films/books will actually dedicate a large chunk of narrative to “getting the group together.” These sections are usually heavily dependent on the specific characters and the specific choices those characters make, plus often a large helping of random coincidence. You can easily get lost trying to recreate those specific story beats at the table. (And even if you do successfully recreate them, it usually means that some players are sitting around for an hour or more waiting for the narrative to onboard their character. Which obviously isn’t ideal.)

For example, in Star Wars the “adventuring party” is Leia, R2-D2, C3-PO, Luke, Obi-Wan, Han, and Chewie. It not only takes half the movie to bring them all together, but it’s all based off of a chain of very specific events (the droids have to be sold to Luke, R2-D2 has to escape, they have to specifically hire the Millennium Falcon as opposed to any other ship, etc.).

Similarly, in Lord of the Rings you have to get all the way to Rivendell before the final adventuring party is assembled.

All of this, of course, should disappear when you strip out the main characters and the actions they take. It’s just that in the specific case of “bringing the party together,” you might be surprised by just how much stuff hits the cutting room floor.

EXAMPLE: STAR WARS

Let’s actually zoom in on Star Wars for a moment as an example of what this might look like in actual practice.

Having removed all of our main characters, what’s the actual premise of the film?

To get the Death Star plans to Alderaan.

Okay, so what’s the situation at the beginning of the movie?

• The plans have been stolen.
• Darth Vader is in pursuit onboard a star destroyer
• The Death Star exists (and has a hidden weakness).
• The rebel base is on Yavin IV.
• There are rebel contacts on Alderaan.

What about all the stuff on Tattooine? Well, its relevance kind of depends on whether or not we ever go to Tattooine in the first place, and that will likely depend on how we exactly we frame the beginning of our adventure and hook the PCs into it.

For example, one option would be to back the clock up and have the PCs be the ones who steal the plans in the first place. This could very easily result in them never going to Tattooine at all, since they could just as easily attempt to flee from Vader’s star destroyer to Naboo or Kashyyyk or Hoth or Cato Neimoidia or an asteroid belt.

Alternatively, maybe you launch the adventure in media res when the group’s escape pod lands on Tattooine: They need to avoid the Imperial soldiers who are pursuing them and they need to get off-planet quick. If that’s the case, we can add:

• Their escape pod lands in an area of Tattooine with moisture farms. (We can prep an example moisture farm.)
• Jawa transports crisscross the area. (They like to steal droids.)
• The PCs need a ship: Mos Eisley is where they can hire or steal a ship. (We could perhaps prep three different ships that they might be able to take.)
• There’s a local crime syndicate run by the Hutts.

Another option would be that the PCs actually have two goals: Steal the Death Star plans and also recruit General Obi-Wan Kenobi, a retired hero of the Clone Wars (who we are now considering an NPC instead of a PC). We could even imagine the PCs perhaps deciding to recruit Obi-Wan Kenobi first.

Or maybe the adventure hook is “recruit Obi-Wan Kenobi” and then, unexpectedly, they’re beamed the Death Star plans as they arrive at Tattooine… and now there’s a star destroyer dropping out of hyperspace on top of them.

Notice how all of these different hooks are going to frame and shape the adventure in slightly different ways, particularly once the players’ choices start interacting with them, but most of them are still going to play out across the top of the same situation-based prep.

On that note, what scenario structures would we actually use to prep our tabletop Star Wars adventure?

Probably several.

First, if we include stealing the Death Star plans, that’s almost certainly a heist.

After they steal the plans, their goal is to deliver them to Alderaan. We could:

• Let them go straight to Alderaan. (Skip ahead to their arrival.)
• Come up with an explanation for why they have to go to another planet on their way to Alderaan. (Fuel?) For this you might just show them a hyperspace network map, let them choose their course, and then have the encounter with Vader’s star destroyer happen, followed by prepping whatever planet they end up on.
• Radically expand this part of the adventure by turning it into a full-fledged McGuffin keep-away.

The advantage of prepping this for your own table is that you don’t need to prep every single planet they could conceivably go to: At the end of the heist, have them choose their escape vector and end the session. Then prep whatever planet the star destroyer attack will strand them on.

(Or, alternatively, have them choose their escape vector, trigger the star destroyer encounter, and then cut as their ship/escape pod crash lands on the planet.)

Regardless, there’s now a clear prep vector: They need a ship. The ship will take them to Alderaan. They’ll discover that Alderaan has been destroyed and see the Death Star (which might result in their ship being tractored in).

However that plays out, they now have to go to Plan B, which is delivering the Death Star plans to the only other rebel base they know about: Yavin IV. The rebel base is pretty straightforward in terms of prep (a brief overview plus some NPCs).

For the Death Star itself, you’ll likely want to prep:

• What happens if the PCs end up inside the Death Star. (See Raiding the Death Star for what that prep would look like.)
• The Trench Run (as a series of spacefighter combat encounters, possibly with some fluid tactical choices about which squads are dealing with which obstacles to clear the run).

Alternatively, you could forego the Trench Run, declare that the “secret weakness” of the Death Star requires a commando raid of the station, and collapse everything into your Death Star raid scenario. Or maybe there are two different options and the players can choose which one they want to pursue.

Notice that, other than the mission objective (“deliver the Death Star plans to Alderaan”), we’re not assuming that things will play out the same way that they did in the movie. We’re just putting the various pieces of the scenario into play: Rebel ops on Alderaan and Yavin IV. Death Star plans are here. This is the route (or routes) to Alderaan from where the Death Star plans are. The Death Star has just blown up Alderaan.

And you’re ready to play to find out.

If you want to see another example of how to do this featuring The Lord of the Rings, read this.

DISGUISING YOUR PURLOINED ADAPTATION

What if your players recognize the source material you’re cribbing from?

Well, sometimes that’s the point. But if it’s not, then you just need to make sure that you either pick source material the players aren’t familiar with and/or scrub off the serial numbers.

This can be a bit harder than it looks. (Changing the One Ring to a magical tiara might throw them off the scent, but the volcano named Mt. Bane might tip them off.) One of the surest ways to hide your inspiration, though, is a complete genre shift.

For example, replace “spaceship” with “spelljammer,” “Mos Eisley” with “Luskan,” and “Death Star” with “Illithid uber-mind.”

They won’t suspect a thing.