Go to Part 1

With a fully stocked rumor table ready to go, it’s time to deliver your rumors to the PCs. Broadly speaking, there are three approaches to doing this (and you’ll probably want to use all three): proactive, reactive, and opportunistic.

Playtest Tip: No matter how they actually get a rumor, you can have the players roll for their rumor! It’s a fun way for them to feel involved in the process and can increase their sense of “ownership” over the rumor they get.

PROACTIVE

Proactive methods sort of “push” rumors on the PCs without the players taking any specific action to acquire them.

INTERVAL TRIGGER: At some regular interval, the PCs pick up new rumors. This might be once per week, at the end of each adventure, once per downtime, or any such trigger.

ACTION/LOCATION TRIGGERS: You might also trigger rumor delivery based on actions the PCs take which are not, explicitly, looking for rumors. For example, they might get new rumors each time they return to town or visit a new town. Or perhaps taking any non-solitary downtime action triggers rumor acquisition.

In City-State of the Invincible Overlord, individual city buildings would be keyed with specific rumors (which would be delivered when the PCs visited those locations). That feels like low-value prep to me, but it could perhaps be used to good effect as a spice.

CHARACTER CREATION: It’s a very good idea to give any brand new character one or more rumors to kick things off. Before play even begins, these rumors will give them the knowledge to start setting goals and making navigational decisions.

RUMOR CHECK: At any point where you have a proactive rumor trigger, you can make a rumor check instead of automatically granting rumors. You’ll also want to decide if it’s possible to gain multiple rumors at the same time, and whether rumors are gained individually or by the whole group.

For example, in my last open table hexcrawl campaign, every new character would get 1d4 rumors (the stuff they’d heard before the player started playing them) and I would make a 1 in 6 rumor check for each PC at the beginning of each session (representing stuff they’d heard around town since the last time we’d seen them in play).

REACTIVE

As the players learn how useful rumors can be, they’re likely to start actively seeking them out. They may also go looking for other types of information without specifically thinking in terms of “rumors,” but which nevertheless can feed rumors to them.

INVESTIGATIVE ACTION: The investigation action is part of the urbancrawl scenario structure, but this covers any effort by the PCs to deliberately canvass a community for information. This effort might require a Charisma (Investigation) or similar check, with the number of rumors gleaned being determined by the relative success of the check.

TAVERN TALK: Buying a round of drinks and plying others over a cup of grog in the common room of a tavern is another common shorthand for gathering rumors.

BROADSHEETS & BULLETIN BOARDS: Broadsheets (the antecedents of newspapers) and bulletin board notices are formal packaging of “rumors,” allowing the PCs to periodically check in and receive a fresh packet of information. (You can imagine any number of similar packages, ranging from town criers to magic mirrors murmuring cryptic prophecies.) The content of each package (broadsheet headlines, job offers on the bulletin board, etc.) can be bespoke creations, but it’s just as easy to roll them up randomly from your rumor table.

RESEARCH: Delving into the tomes of the local library or digging through the musty scrolls of the official chronicles may not turn up any rumors dealing with purely current events, but there are any number of rumors that can nevertheless be delivered through PC research (e.g., the trade in wyvern eggs a generation back).

ADDING COST: Regardless of the precise method pursued by the PCs, you might consider attaching a cost to it (for buying a round of drinks, well-placed bribes, access fees at the university library, etc.). I’d recommend against making this a particularly large fee, since obviously you don’t want to discourage players from pursuing rumors. Something like 1d6 gp is quite reasonable.

Another option is to make the fee optional, but have it grant a bonus to the PCs’ skill check (making success more likely or improving the quality or number of rumors gained). In this case, since it’s not essential, you can elect to make the cost more substantial.

Once a cost, optional or otherwise, has been attached to rumor-gathering, one cool thing you can do is add this cost to the equipment list for your campaign: Now every new player rolling up a character and every returning player looking to resupply for their next expedition will have an in-their-face reminder that hunting for rumors is something they can do.

OPPORTUNISTIC

Because the whole point of the rumor table is to impart information to the players, you should seize opportunities during play that you can use to leverage your rumor table. For example:

• During any broad social interaction (e.g., the players say “we spend the evening drinking at the tavern”) you might mention one or two interesting things they pick up in the general conversation.
• During specific interactions with NPCs, the rumor table can be used to generate topics of conversation.
• NPCs might be specifically questioned or interrogated about the area.

In practice, the rumor table can be an incredibly versatile tool, and whenever a dollop of information would be useful or provide a bit of spice, you can simply roll or select an appropriate rumor for the situation.

CONTEXTUALIZING RUMORS

When giving a rumor to a player, you can simply drop it in their lap: “You’ve head that a wyvern has been attacking travelers along the Southway.” It works. There’s nothing wrong with it. In fact, it may often be the best way to present a particular rumor. (For example, when I’m handing out rumors to newly created characters at my open table, I don’t feel a need to get fancy about it: Here’s the stuff you know. If you’d like, maybe you could tell me how you know it.)

Frequently, however, you’ll find it more effective to contextualize the rumor – to explain exactly how they came by the information and perhaps even give them the opportunity to play through it. This is when you frame up a scene at the local tavern where the PCs have noticed a young man with a freshly bandaged wound on his shoulder. Now they can strike up a conversation with him, learn his name, and hear from his own lips the tale of how the wyvern attacked his caravan and carried away his sister. They can see the haunted look in his eyes as he describes how her screams still echo in his ears.

Now those wyvern attacks have been given a face.

If you want a more detailed breakdown of how to contextualize this sort of thing, check out Rulings in Practice: Gathering Information. But the short version is:

1. Summarize how they’re looking for information.
2. Frame the key moment where they’re actually receiving the information. (This may include playing out a short scene, but it may not.)
3. Contextualize the information, taking cues from the situation, characters, etc. to provide a specific slant or POV on the rumor.

If you’re uncertain how the PCs might have found the information, ask the players what they’re looking for then. See what they throw at you and then play it forward. Or here’s a short list of options:

• Talking in a tavern. (Is it a quiet conversation? Or do they hear someone boisterously boasting at the next table?)
• Saw the information posted somewhere (a wanted poster, a bulletin board, etc.).
• Chatting with a friend. (Which friend? Ask the player if you don’t know.)
• Performing research. (Where?)
• A letter. (From who?)
• A tarot reading, fortune telling, or divine vision.

OPEN TABLE RUMOR POOL

Here’s a fun technique that seems to work best with an open table, but can also be adapted for a dedicated campaign: When a PC gains access to a rumor, it gets added to the open table rumor pool. This list of rumors can be posted in the group’s Discord, put on a wiki, periodically updated by e-mail, or whatever other method of coordination your group is using.

When a rumor is resolved (e.g., the wyvern is slain), reward Inspiration. You can limit this to just the group who resolved the rumor, but it may be even more effective to award it to every single PC in the campaign. This heightens the sense of community in the open table, and can also motivate people to get back to the gaming table ASAP. (Since otherwise their Inspiration will be “wasted” if someone resolves another rumor before they can use it.)

You can also leave the decision of whether to share a rumor with the open table rumor pool up to the individual players: Doing so gives them the opportunity to benefit if someone else can capitalize on the information, but keeping a rumor secret might be desirable if they specifically want to exploit it for their own gain.

MODERATE YOUR RUMORMONGERING

Rumors are good.

Too many rumors, however, will overload your players. They just turn into meaningless noise, and the players will just tune them all out. So, paradoxically, too many rumors can end up being functionally identical to no rumors at all.

In short, to achieve maximum effect with your rumors, you want to limit how many of them you’re handing out.

How many? Well, this depends on the players. I’ve had some players who keep meticulous notes and will have a couple dozen rumors scrupulously listed (and even carefully cross-referenced to their maps!). I’ve had other players who get a third rumor and basically say, “Fuck this noise.” So this is really something you have to play by ear and be willing to adjust on-the-fly.

The key thing to moderate, though, are your proactive rumors: Opportunistic stuff tends to be linked to specific interactions which makes it more significant. And reactive stuff, obviously, is happening at the players’ own request, and so is naturally not overburdening them.

In many ways, though, this is ideal in any case: You really just want a smattering of proactive stuff to (a) help players who would otherwise be lost and (b) remind players that rumors exist, prompting them to do their own legwork to dig up more information on their own recognizance (and to whatever amount they want).

With that being said, you may also want to limit the group’s ability to systematically drain all the available rumors out of the campaign. You might want to, for example, limit them to 1d4 rumors per downtime or per session. Alternatively, perhaps villages are limited to 1 rumor, towns to 1d4 rumors, and metropolises to 2d6 rumors (1d4 of which require special effort). This structure can actually be used to motivate the PCs to explore more: You want more information? You’ll have to go to the big city.

Go to Part 3: Restocking Your Rumor Table

As we’ve previously discussed, exploration can take several forms. The most basic form is simple curiosity, in which you just randomly look around hoping to find something interesting. This is, more or less, the level of exploration provided by the basic hexcrawl structure: You pick a direction and you march forth to see what’s there.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. Curiosity is the bedrock of exploration. But for a hexcrawl to truly come to life, the players need to be able to learn information about the region so that they can:

• set specific goals,
• ask specific questions, and
• plan their expeditions.

This is the function of the rumor table, which in its most basic form is simply a random table: Roll a die and tell the players a rumor. Each rumor provides a tangible nugget of information about the region:

d10  Rumor

1       North of Graykeep, there is a ruined arena which is home to minotaur.

2       A merchant has been kidnapped by goblins in the Old Forest.

3       An ogre living along Silkmauk Road has been known to offer aid and enigmatic trinkets to travelers.

4       There are ancient altars of red jadeite scattered throughout the area.

5       The old imperial fort stands on a plateau southwest of town.

6       The lizardmen of Tockmarsh are said to treat all tabaxi as if they were gods.

7       A white wyrm’s lair lies at the headwaters of the Red Rapids river.

8       A nymph of the White Wood will trade magic items for a vial of your tears.

9       In the Old Forest there’s a circle of stone sarsens. Stand amidst them and blow on horn of mistletoe and you can open a fairy gate.

10     Flying carpets have been seen in the skies around Mt. Skarlap, which lies east of town.

You can see how the rumors on this table would instruct the PCs about local regions (Old Forest, the Tockmarsh, White Woods) and interesting adventuring sites (old imperial fort, Graykeep, ruined arena, Mt. Skarlap) that they can now consciously choose to seek out (or use as navigational markers) rather than just stumbling across them randomly.

If this information is so useful, why not just give it all to them in one big infodump? Partly this comes down to effective pacing. In an exploration-based campaign, you really want the players to be slowly learning new things about the area over time. This also avoids information overload: By spreading the information out over time, it becomes easier for the players to process it and use it. (It’s the same reason you don’t read a textbook cover-to-cover, instead processing a section of the textbook and then applying it through practice problems, classroom discussions, etc. before proceeding to the next section.)

Conversely, if you only want to give the PCs a few rumors at a time, why go to the trouble of stocking an entire rumor table? Why not just design the handful of bespoke rumors that you’re going to give them? Well, as we’ll see, a good rumor table is an incredibly useful runtime tool for the GM, useful for responding to any number of actions which might be taken by the PCs.

STOCKING THE RUMOR TABLE

Stocking a rumor table is pretty straightforward: Figure out what size die you want to roll, list that number of rumors, and number them. (Or, vice versa, make a list of rumors until you run out of ideas or feel like you have enough, then count them, and assign whatever die size seems most appropriate.)

But how many active rumors should you aim to have in your hexcrawl?

There’s no one-true-answer here. Personally, I like to have twenty. A d20 is convenient, and it gives you enough rumors to cover the breadth of the hexcrawl without going overboard. (If you own a d30, that can also be a fun way to use that unusual die. But a table of d100 rumors, in my experience, can be a lot of work to prep without really providing a lot of extra value.)

In making each rumor, you’re going to be looking at its source, focus, type, and truth value.

SOURCE

The source of a rumor might be a:

• hex
• random encounter tables
• roads/paths/trails
• factions
• NPCs

Basically, anything you’ve keyed or created for the hexcrawl can (and arguably should!) be fodder for your rumor table.

In fact, if I’ve started struggling to come up with new rumors to stock my rumor table with, a technique I’ve found useful is to just pick a random hex, look at what I’ve keyed there, and then figure out a rumor that could lead the PCs to it. (If you’ve done a 10 x 10 hexmap, for example, you can just roll two d10’s, cross-reference their position, and look at the resulting hex.)

Playtest Tip: You can also use this “pick a random hex, that’s your rumor” technique during actual play to generate rumors even in the absence of a stocked rumor table. Obviously this means you need to be a little more comfortable improvising rumors, but it’s a very flexible technique which, crucially, requires zero prep.

FOCUS

Potential focuses for a rumor can include:

• Location
• Creature
• Object
• Actions/Situations (including threats and upcoming situations)
• Background/Lore

For example, let’s consider one of our example hexes from Hexcrawl Addendum: Designing the Hexcrawl:

C2 – WYVERN SHAFT

60 foot deep shaft that serves as the lair of a wyvern. The wyvern has dug an escape tunnel that emerges from a hill a quarter mile away.

Wyvern: Has a large scar on its left side from a spear wound.

Treasure: 7,000 sp, 5 zircons (50 gp each)

What rumors could we generate from this?

Location: Adventurers exploring the Red Plateau southwest of town report seeing a mysterious 60-foot-deep shaft.

Creature: A wyvern has been seen flying over the Red Plateau.

Object: A wyvern attacked a tax assessor’s wagon along the Southway and carried off a lockbox containing 7,000 sp.  It was last seen flying west.

Situation: A wyvern has been attacking travelers along the Southway.

Lore: A generation ago wyvern eggs were taken from the Red Plateau and sent east so that the hatchlings could imprint on imperial wyvern riders. The practice ended because the plateau became depopulated as a result of the egg-harvesting.

Note that, regardless of the rumor’s focus, each rumor is actionable, in the sense that it gives a clear location for the PCs to go. This is not strictly necessary, but should be much more the rule than the exception: The primary function of the rumor table is to guide and inform the PCs’ explorations, and it can’t do that if the PCs lack the information necessary to do anything with the rumor. (For example, a rumor that just said “there’s a wyvern in the area” is, at best, very limited in its utility, because there’s no way for the PCs to go looking for the wyvern other than just wandering around randomly.)

The actionable specificity of the rumor can vary quite a bit, though. “West of the Southway” is less precise than “check out the Red Plateau,” which is less precise than “the adventurers offer to sell you a map indicating the precise location of the shaft for 10 gold pieces.” But even the vaguest of these nevertheless provides some specific direction.

TYPE

Thinking about a rumor’s type, in my experience, is mostly useful if I’m struggling to come up with a good rumor. But most rumors will fall into one of five types.

Local Color tells you something about an area or the people/monsters who live there (e.g., “The White Woods lies north of Mt. Skarlap” or “the ealdorman is a man named Harlan, who lost his wife in a goblin raid twenty years ago”). Local color may be actionable — if you know the White Wood exists, then you can choose to go there — but lacks a specific motivation for doing so.

Other local color may not truly be actionable at all. As such, you might even want to maintain a separate table of Local Color Rumors that you can consciously choose to mix in with more meaningful intelligence.

Opportunities offer a reward, payoff, or some other form of gain. Treasure is always great — caches of magic items or bounties paid for the capture of an outlaw, that sort of thing — but there are many forms of reward: land, favors, a chance to flirt with a handsome centaur. Think about what motivates your PCs and seed that into your rumor tables.

Challenges are like opportunities, but with the addition of some clear threat or obstacle which must be overcome in order to gain the reward. Capturing a bandit to get their bounty is an example of this, as is a mine infested with goblins or a haunted forest where rare alchemical reagents can be found.

One form of reward that may not be immediately apparent is the simple desire to be a Big Damn Hero. If you tell the players that farms in the Fieflands are being attacked by mutant marauders, the desire to save the day may be more than enough to prompt them.

This is aided and abetted by the common D&D conceit that “where there be monsters, there by treasure.” If you tell the PCs about a wyvern attacking travelers along the Southway, you don’t probably don’t need to tell the players that “the wyvern is guarding a cache of treasure” for them to infer it.

Dangers are like challenges, but without reward. The other way to think about this is that a challenge or opportunity is something that the PCs might set as a goal for themselves (find the nymph of the White Wood, slay the wyvern, etc.), but a danger is something for them avoid, most likely while pursuing other goals. It’s the Valley of the Monocs they should go around; or the red gems in Cawthorne Keep that should be eschewed.

The distinction here can be kind of hazy, and will likely even shift as the PCs grow in power and ability. (“There’s a dragon over there!” is a terrifying danger to a group of 1^st level characters, but a rich opportunity that will leave higher level characters salivating at the thought of looting its hoard.)

Mysteries are similar to opportunities, but the “reward” is simply unraveling the unknown and/or learning secret lore: What’s causing those strange lights in the Tockmarsh? Why are there 60-foot-wide shafts drilled into the earth all over this area? Who built the red jadeite altars?

This category of rumor really relies on humanity’s innate curiosity: It may take nothing more than offering the players an enigma to fill them with a burning desire to resolve it.

A final thing to note is that we’re categorizing the content of the rumor, not necessarily reality: For example, a rumor might offer an opportunity of an abandoned silver mine… and it’s only when they arrive that the PCs discover it’s infested with goblins. Something offered simply as a mystery to unravel might nevertheless result in discovering a huge treasure hoard.

TRUTH VALUE

Keeping this distinction between rumor content and reality is also useful as we look at the truth value of the rumor. Rumors can be:

• True
• False
• Partial (there is a hermit in Shamrock Cave, but the rumor didn’t mention he’s a psychotic axe murderer)
• Mixed (the “friendly old hermit in Shamrock Cave” exists, but he’s not friendly)

In structural terms, the key thing to keep in mind is that even a completely false rumor can nevertheless motivate the PCs to go somewhere or do something that will result in adventure.

What you want to avoid, however, is continually offering them rewards and then leaving them with nothing. As long as the players are getting reliably enjoyable experiences following rumors (even when the rumors are false), they’ll continue following them. If that stops being true, however, the players will just ignore rumors as being worse than a waste of time, and all of the wonderful utility of rumors will be lost to you.

Go to Part 2: Hearing Rumors

Matt Mercer, Aabria Iyengar, and Brennan Lee Mulligan — all of whom have run canonical actual plays in the world of Exandria — sat down together for a roundtable discussion of their GMing techniques.

There’s a lot of GMing talent in that room and a lot of great GMing advice in the video. I wanted to kind of dig that advice out and make it accessible, so I rewatched the video and took some notes. Then I thought it might be valuable to polish up those notes and share them here. In practice, that’s turned into a little bit of a ramble as I try to both capture what they were saying, while also sharing my own thoughts on what it means.

Where necessary I’ve used [square brackets] to indicate my original thoughts.

GROKKING A SETTING

I’ve done my own video on coming to grips with a published setting, so I found these thoughts interesting.

Matt: As I learned to GM, I would just create new settings because I was too scared to dive into established settings like Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk. So I understand there can be a reticence or anxiety about not wanting to “ruin” the setting or run it incorrectly.

Brennan then talked about how their experience running Exandria was fundamentally different from a GM running it at home, because anything that they say during the actual play becomes official canon.

Aabria: Try it when the guy who made the world is at your table.

Matt: The good news is that for the majority of you, it will not be livestreamed to the internet. So you can fuck it up as much as you want.

Aabria: Nobody 100%’s the lore. (…) Give yourself a little bit of grace.

There are a couple practical tips here:

• Take a break and go look stuff up when you need to.
• Set your campaign in a corner of the setting where you can’t “break” anything.

But the really big idea is:

Matt: Establish in Session 0 that this is your version of the setting. If you really want to be hardcore into the canon you can, but the intent with writing the [setting books] is to make information that you can use. That’s meant to be helpful. That you can take and use as much as you want to the letter, or break it apart and remake it however you want.

If you give yourself permission to own the setting and make your own version of it, the problem (and anxiety) kind of just goes away: Once it’s yours, any “mistakes” you make are actually just the truth of your setting.

Mercer explicitly rejects the auteur theory of creation, particularly in the context of roleplaying games: Exandria was “born from accident” and developed collectively. Even in his own group, it’s not something that belongs exclusively to him.

[Establishing this attitude in Session 0 also frees the players from this burden. It’s okay to shoot Darth Vader. You won’t have broken anything. You’ll have created something new.]

SESSION 0 & CHARACTER PLANNING

“I have a class. And spells. And magical gear. And literally no desires and no attachments.” Buddy, that’s enlightenment. I don’t know what to tell you. You’re actually done. You beat the game.

Brennan Lee Mulligan

Session 0 fulfills several functions:

• It establishes safety tools (lines & veils).
• It’s an amuse-bouche that clears the palette from your previous campaign.
• It sets tone for the campaign.

For an actual play, having an off-camera Session 0 is important because it gives the players space to explore ideas without feeling committed to them.

But the core discussion revolves around character creation. For a long-term campaign, you’re going to be spending dozens, hundreds, or thousands of hours with the characters. So you want to spend the time to get the characters right.

• But also don’t be afraid to sunset characters who aren’t working. Allow players to retool their characters or even retire them and bring in a new character.

Session 0 character creation can be even more important for short campaigns, though, because you won’t have the time to explore and gradually develop the characters (and their relationships) through play.

AT THE TABLE: Do character creation at the table. This allows players to bounce ideas off each other and create pre-existing relationships between their characters. The result is an overt history shared by the group. [You can see an example of this in practice in Dragon Heist: Creating the Characters.]

SUB-GROUPS: You can enhance this by having one-on-one or small group sessions with subsets of the full group. (This can also be done virtually or by e-mail between sessions.) This allows for the creation of secret histories known only to

[This is desirable because (a) enigma drives interest and (b) dramatic revelations are fun. If you’re wondering what’s really going with someone else’s PC, the interest generated will immerse you into that relationship. And it’s fun to be the center of attention for a dramatic reveal; that’s an experience that doesn’t have to be limited to the GM.

This notably, for me, illustrates a central truth: An RPG is an act of narrative creation, and I don’t (necessarily) mean that in the sense of storytelling. I mean that the game is simultaneously the creation of an event AND the spoken narration/description of that event. Furthermore, players in an RPG are simultaneously creators and audience; they are both participants in the creation of the game’s narrative and also the audience for that narrative. (The rise of televised actual play obviously begins to shift this dynamic, but it obviously remains largely true.)

Furthermore, there is a tension between the mantle of Creator and the mantle of Audience. We’ll come back to this.]

KEY ELEMENTS: [I’m creating some jargon from the discussion here.]

• Momentum are attachments. Friends, enemies, debts, etc.
• Trajectory are the character’s initial goals.
• Motivation is the character’s “why.” What is it that they want?

So if you have a player who isn’t providing back story, you need to ask them: Where’s your momentum coming from? What is driving you? What do you want to achieve? [Because the question goes both ways: These things come from back story, but figuring these out will also inform your back story.] Where you are from informs where you’re going.

It’s not about the amount of character backstory. “You don’t need a forty page back story to do this.” You just need enough backstory for these key elements to be in place and for the character to “click” into place.

Nothing wrong with forty pages of back story if that’s what the player wants or needs! Aabria Iyengar has a tip, though: Five minutes before the session, ask everyone, “What’s your back story?” Because no matter the length, in that moment the player will focus in on what’s most essential for them.

Tip: Backstory also tells you where the players’ focus is. As Brennan puts it (paraphrasing), “No clerics? Guess I won’t bother developing the gods, then.”

GAME MASTER AS GREEK CHORUS

Matt Mercer also notes that, “Back story is an invitation to the GM; not an expectation.”

But it’s a potent invitation because the easiest way to prep is to ask, “What do you think you’re going to be doing [as a character]?” And then prep that. (As opposed to saying, “This is what you’re going to do,” and then trying to figure out how to motivate the PCs to do that.)

Brennan characterizes back story as “plot hooks you’ll bite every time.” He contrasts the mysterious necromancer in the corner who the players can freely ignore as opposed to, “Your uncle, who you swore to kill, is here.”

This really sets up the idea of the GM as the chorus of a Greek play: The chorus does not drive the plot forward. It exists to establish the scene, reflect and comment upon the actions of the characters, and also to provoke and inspire their action. In just this way, an RPG campaign is driven by the players and their characters, while the GM creates opportunity and context for them to do so.

Matt: Part of the preparation (…) is getting to know enough about the world and the kind of story that you’re going to tell, so that when you start, you can kinda let all that preparation go and just ride with the player’s actions; their agency. And have that bag at the ready. At that point a lot of your preparation should be modular. You should know which things are important to tell the story, what bits of information you feel would be the most impactful for the players to discover, to uncover, to take to heart and use to drive them towards a goal, to fulfill that heroic fantasy, or that horror narrative, whatever it is that you’re using to tell.

[This is what I refer to as active play. You create these modular bits so that you can play freely with them at the table.]

RAILS vs. OBSTACLES

What I’m looking for when I’m a player is full immersion. I don’t want the experience of being a storyteller when I’m a PC. And that’s a little bit of a different thing. A lot of indie games want a flat hierarchy at the table where everybody is a storyteller. I don’t want that as a player. When I’m a player, I want to be living in a story, immersed into a character that is not, to their knowledge, living in a story. As Evan Kelmp says, “I am not a character.” I don’t want to play a character that’s thinking about their fucking narrative arc. I want to play a character who wants to save the world as quickly and efficiently as possible. But I, as the player, want the arc. So me and my character exist at odds.

Brennan Lee Mulligan

[Here we return to the tension between player as Creator and player as Audience. This tension is not a bad thing. It drives the central creative act of a roleplaying game in a way almost entirely unique to it as a medium, and when you get the balance right it creates a feedback loop of excitement.

And this type of tension is not, it should be noted, a strictly dramatist concern, although Brennan puts it in these terms. If you think in gamist terms: You, as a player, have a desire for victory. But you simultaneously don’t want that victory to be trivial.]

It’s the GM’s role at the table to resolve this tension; to unify the player’s desire and the character’s desire.

Brennan: So what does it mean if I want to provide that experience to the player? [Characters] are like water. They are going down the hill as fast as they can, seeking the path of least resistance. But the player wants anything other than a straight line. So my job as the “rails” is irrigating a path down that slope that lets the water always have taken the fastest route towards its goal, but at the end of it, the shape is the most convoluted and pleasing. You achieved the shape of a story while you were trying your hardest to avoid it.

The “rails” that Brennan is describing here are not railroading. They are obstacles. It’s the GM’s role to put obstacles between the PCs and what they want. The obstacles that Brennan is talking about are primarily derived from dramatic sensibility, but — as we’ve already discussed — the same equally applies to gamism or simulationism: The level-appropriate opponents who create challenge are placed between the PCs and their goal so that the PCs have to overcome them. Goals are not trivially achievable because the world would not feel real if they were.

Brennan also inverts this metaphor: The “rails” are ultimately designed by the players. They emerge from the character’s backstory. They are the hooks you’ll bite at every time; the uncle you swore to kill showing up to cause problems.

RANDOM TIPS AND INSIGHTS

OTHELLO TOKENS: Use the plastic discs from an Othello game set as generic monster tokens. You can use wet-erase markers on the white side of the token to identify the monster or indicate current hit point totals. [You can also flip the token to the black side to clearly indicate a corpse. It feels like corpses should be difficult terrain, but we so often lose track of them narratively.]

WHERE DO THE RELICS COME FROM? There are specific tropes in D&D. When you’re doing world-building for D&D, you want to identify those tropes and back specific explanations for them into the world, so that those tropes flow organically from the world and are a natural part of it.

[This can apply broadly to almost any setting creation. For example, let’s say you wanted to create a planet-hopping space opera. The essential trope here is that you need to be able to get from one planet to another very quickly: Cheap FTL is going to give you one setting. A solar system with dozens of terraformed planets is going to give you another. Stargates give another. Cross-planar journeys through what our ancestors called the elf-lands gives another.]

NO TIME FOR SESSION 0? If you’re running a one-shot, for example. You can replace some of that work by giving the PCs private moments at the beginning of the scenario. [And also framing scenes with smaller sub-groupings before bringing everyone together.]

Sometimes you can also use e-mail or text messages to ask questions before the session starts.

ACCEPTING OFFERS: The triad here talks about how, “Aabria is a great GM from the player’s chair,” by which they mean that she can see the storytelling beats a GM is setting up and will line herself up to hit the incoming pitch. These players recognize that you’re singing a note because you want to harmonize; and, vice versa, they sing a note because they’re hoping you’ll harmonize.

BATTLEMAPS AS IMPROV SEED. Highly detailed battlemaps can lock players into a particular visualization of the battlefield, but this can be useful if it encourages them to interact with the battlefield in creative ways. The example is given of a player seeing chains on the map and then grabbing them in-character.

…BUT YOU DON’T HAVE A BATTLEMAP: When playing theater of the mind, make it a conscious habit to establish three details of the battlefield. You don’t have to have a plan for how they’re going to be used; just make sure there’s scenery there and you’ll find that circumstance and creativity will make use of it.

And, Feng Shui-style, it can be useful to explicitly give players explicit permission to infer and/or ask about the presence of detail.

AABRIA’S SIGNATURE MOVE: “And here’s what you don’t see.” A cinematic technique in which the GM describes a scene that none of the PCs are present to witness. This can be very powerful.

Brennan: And my head popped off my body, spun around in a circle, and said, “You can do that?!” And then settled back onto my shoulders… Talk about inviting the audience in.

Brennan’s quote here is particularly interesting in light of his earlier discussion regarding the fact that he wants to remain in character. How can this be if he’s so completely blown away by a technique feeding him information that his character has no access to?

Because, once again, the player is both Creator and Audience.

CONCLUSION

If you have time, make sure to check out the full video! There’s a lot of fun stuff — anecdotes, random observations, etc. — that aren’t captured in these notes.

Go to Part 1

You can run a depthcrawl using just the material above, but you may find these advanced options useful. It should be noted, however, that these options are only lightly sketched in. There are quite a few options and variations you could pursue in achieving any of these.

GETTING LOST

If the PCs become lost:

• Add d4-1 depth increments (instead of whatever the normal depth increment is).
• Generate a location at their new depth, which is unconnected to any known location.

Option: If they roll the maximum result on the d4, re-roll using a d6-1. If they roll the maximum result again, step the die result to d8-1. Repeat as necessary.

PCs could become lost by:

• Fleeing a fight
• Getting captured
• Suffering a catastrophe
• Unwilling teleportation

You might also require navigation checks when the PCs are moving between locations. On a failed check, they become lost.

PROGRESS

If the PCs are searching for something specific, you could:

• Randomly determine which location it’s in (and then the PCs can find it when they find that location); or
• Make a random check in each new location to determine if the thing they seek is there (1 in 6, 1 in 10, or whatever feels appropriate).

Alternatively, you could use a system of progress:

• Set a seeking value based on how difficult and/or distant the desired objective is.
• When the group’s progress equals the seeking value, they’ve achieved their goal.

How the group increases their progress will depend on what it is they’re seeking. Options might include:

• exploring a new location
• getting information from an NPC
• reading a relevant tome
• finding a clue

For example, in The Stygian Library, Emmy Allen includes a progress system that can be used to determine when the PCs have successfully found the information they seek within the library.

PCs might also lose progress by:

• being lied to
• becoming lost
• having information or vital artifacts destroyed

What does “progress” actually represent?

One option is that it’s entirely a matter of pacing: There’s just a point where you finally stumble onto the thing you’ve been looking for.

Alternatively, it can represent a breadcrumb trail: A says they think B might know something, but when the PCs get there B is dead (perhaps leaving a documentary clue or maybe you need to hunt down their phantom) or missing (solve their disappearance) or doesn’t know (“…but you know who might?”) or has reportedly gone to location C (“let’s follow them!”).

In practice, it’s likely that the players will provide their own breadcrumb trail by coming up with some clever idea (or not so clever idea) for how they can pursue their goal.

GETTING DIRECTIONS

One weakness of a procedural generation system like a depthcrawl is that it becomes difficult to provide directions. If they’re exploring some unknown land and you run into a friendly native, it would be perfectly natural for the PCs to ask a question like, “Where’s the Ebon Bindery?”

But in a depthcrawl you don’t actually know where the Ebon Bindery is until you’ve randomly generated it, so how can you respond to the perfectly natural question?

Obviously one option is to stonewall: Nobody ever knows where anything is. But this is unsatisfying for any number of reasons (it breaks the suspension of disbelief, it negates meaningful choice, etc.).

Another option is to use progress (see above): Simply say, “The old man gives you directions to the Ebon Bindery,” and set a seeking value. When the PCs follow the directions, they gain progress.

An alternative would be to pregenerate the pointcrawl map between the PCs’ current location and their desired location. You could do that by just randomly rolling until the Ebon Bindery turns up, but it may be more effective to just arbitrarily decide how far away the Ebon Bindery is (or roll 1d6+2 or something like to randomly determine it) and then simply generate the requisite points between here and there. (This is more time consuming, but has the advantage that you can now tell the players what the actual directions are: “You need to head south past the tree bearing Jarcani runes, then turn southeast until you reach the Crimson River…” And so forth.)

REPEATED LOCATIONS

When you re-roll a location that you’ve previously rolled (and placed), what should happen? Broadly speaking, there are two options.

It’s the same location, in which case you draw a path from the PCs’ current location back to the previously visited location. They’ve ended up going in a circle.

It’s a similar, but different location. Roll a new detail and event to customize the new location.

Depending on the situation, you might:

• Always do one or the other. (Note, however, that never having the pointcrawl map loop back on itself will result in a less interesting and perhaps even frustrating map.)
• Arbitrarily choose based on what makes the most sense.
• Randomly determine. (Perhaps roll 1d6; 1-4 means it’s the same location, 5-6 means it’s a new location. Or the other way around.)

Whatever method you use might also vary depending on the type of location. (There’s only one Crystal Grotto in the Forest of Doom, so once you’ve generated it, all future instances are a path back to the same Crystal Grotto. On the other hand, there’s any number of Ancient Trees to be found.)

CHART A COURSE

Let’s say that the PCs want to go back to a known location but NOT by the route they know. (Maybe the way is blocked by goblin cannibals or a volcanic explosion has wiped out the road they took. Whatever.) To accommodate this, you might add a GO AROUND move:

• Make a navigation check. On a failure, treat this as a Go Deeper move instead. (They cannot find their target location.)
• On a success, move the group’s depth one depth increment closer to their target location.
• If their current depth equals their target depth, they’ve found a path to that location.
• If not, make a depth check on the Location table, a depth check on the Details table, and roll for an Event.
• Make an encounter check.

PCs who are lost should not be allowed to Go Around until they have oriented themselves.

RETURNING TO THE DEPTHCRAWL

If the PCs leave the depthcrawl and later return, how should that be handled?

TABULA RASA: In both The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library, Emmy Allen wipes the slate clean. The previously generated map is discarded and you start again from the beginning. These are strange, feyish, and ever-shifting realms, and even your point of entry may not take you to the same place you arrived last time.

PERSISTENT MAP: The other extreme, of course, is to simply not do that. If you leave the Underdark, but then choose to return, the pointcrawl map you’ve generated (and the navigational knowledge the PCs have gleaned) persists.

Of course, if you enter the Underdark or the Venom Abyss from a different location, then it would be perfectly appropriate to begin generating a new pointcrawl map using the same depthcrawl generator. (An interesting question in this case would be whether or not it’s possible to link this new pointcrawl map with the older pointcrawl map. You might take some guidance from “Repeated Locations,” above, but it will also depend on exactly what and where these two entrances are.)

EVER-SHIFTING WAYS: If you want to capture feyish uncertainty or fracturing reality without a complete tabula rasa, you might consider making the paths between locations uncertain. For example, each time the PCs revisit a path there could be a 1 in 6 chance that the path no longer exists, causing them to become either lost or simply stumbling into a different location than the one they expected.

For a truly chaotic landscape, this check might be made every time they revisit a path (even on the same journey). For something subtler, perhaps you check the paths only between expeditions.

CONCLUSION

I’ve mentioned them several times already, but in conclusion I’d like to note that, if you’d like to see what a fully fledged depthcrawl looks like in all its glory, you should check out Emmy Allen’s The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library. They were the first and, as far as I can tell, they remain the best exemplars of the form.

The concept of the depthcrawl was created by Emmy “Cavegirl” Allen for The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library. It’s a method for procedurally generating exploration-oriented pointcrawls with a strong sense of progression into a vast, unknowable domain. Allen, in particular, uses the concept to great effect in creating feyish, non-liminal spaces, but I think it can be put to good effect in almost any number of ways.

WHAT YOU PREP

To create a depthcrawl generator, you need to prep:

• Locations
• Details
• Events
• Encounters

Each of these will be listed on separate random generation tables. The size of these tables, the number of entries appearing on them, and the organization of those entries will depend on both the desired scope of your depthcrawl and the specific depthcrawl procedure you set up (see below). You may also find it useful to create additional procedural generation tools — for example, The Stygian Library has a table of random tomes — but these are not strictly necessary and will depend on the particulars of your scenario.

LOCATIONS are the core element of each point in your pointcrawl. You can go very generic with these, perhaps offering nothing more than a label or a few words of description (e.g., “grove,” “stream,” etc.). But I think you’ll have better results if you provide at least some degree of specificity. A simple example might be something like this:

AN ANCIENT TREE

A tree at least two or three times larger than those which surround it. Its bark is intricately carved with arcane runes which glow blue during the day and crimson red at night. Close inspection reveals that several of these runes have been marred, rendering them unreadable.

But even higher levels of detail are certainly possible, perhaps ranging all the way up to providing a small map of a dungeon, cave, or building.

DETAILS either add to or somehow twist the nature of locations. These might be individual elements (e.g., a lamp-post or Jarcani runes) or they could be broadly thematic (e.g., lurid light or clockwork parts), with the former generally being additions to the scene and the latter usually altering it.

For example, if you combined “abandoned mansion” with “lamp-post,” that probably means that there’s a lamp-post at the mansion — perhaps quite naturally in front of it; or perhaps oddly standing in the middle of the dining room. On the other hand, “clockwork parts” might transform a “forest grove” into a technomantic marvel of mechanical trees and steampunk critters.

EVENTS are active elements that are either taking place in the location when the PCs arrive or which will happen while they are there. You generally want to avoid specificity here, instead indicating a broad type of event, so that events can be repeated again and again — transformed by their immediate circumstance — without the depthcrawl becoming repetitive.

The exception is any element of the setting which should be repetitive. For example, if there are strange crystalline pylons which float throughout the area and periodically send a pulse of light straight up into the sky… well, the arrival of a pylon is probably a good candidate for an event.

Another trick is to use an event to trigger specificity from a different random generator, such as your encounter tables. For example:

TWO FACTIONS ENGAGE

Roll twice on the Encounter Table to determine which creatures are present. Then roll on the Reaction Table to determine what their current relationship is (friendly, uncertain, or hostile).

Or:

MAGICAL GATE OPENS

Roll a random Location to which the gate leads. On a roll of 1, it instead operates as a sphere of annihilation.

ENCOUNTERS are a standard check and table for wandering monsters. You could flesh this out into a more robust generator (adding a reaction check, % lair, or other such things that seem appropriate), but you really want these to be procedural encounters, not designed encounters. You want to be able to inject these denizens freely into any number of situations.

CREATING LOCATIONS

The magic at the core of the depthcrawl is taking a location, detail, event, and (optionally) an encounter and weaving them together to create something unique. So if you prep twenty locations, twenty details, and twenty events, you don’t end up with twenty options, you end up with eight thousand options.

And really it’s even more than that because there are lots of different ways to interpret each combination of elements.

For example, let’s say you roll up:

• Location: Ancient Tree
• Detail: Clockwork Parts
• Event: Magic Gate Opens

You might decide that the interior of the tree is laced with strange clockwork parts (which you can see where a bolt of lightning split the trunk long ago) and the runes are part of the powerful technomantic construct which can be used to open a magical portal.

Or, alternatively, you might decide that a strange clockwork device has been attached to the side of the tree and is very carefully slicing out each arcane rune from its bark one at a time. They are being collected by (roll an encounter) strange warriors wearing insectile-helmets, who return via a magical portal that opens while the PCs are investigating the tree.

DEPTH

The core concept of the depthcrawl is that the rolls on these random tables are affected by depth, with the results of the checks sliding across the table based on how far the PCs have progressed into the depthcrawl.

Note: Event rolls are often not affected by depth because they typically flow depth-affected content — i.e., random encounters — into a generic event type.

Depth itself is an abstract concept, representing how far the PCs are from where they started (the entrance of a labyrinth, the interplanar gate, their base camp, the silver skein that lies on the border of the afterlife, etc.): You can think of it as literal depth beneath the earth (i.e., similar to how you descend from one level of the dungeon to the next), but that’s probably more deceptive than not. Depth in a depthcrawl could just as easily refer to how far you’ve journeyed into the Venom Abyss of Planegea, for example.

Regardless, the further you get into the depthcrawl, the larger your depth becomes.

The most basic version of a depth check is a die roll + depth. For example, 1d20 + depth or 1d8 + depth. In setting these values, you’ll want to consider how deep a typical adventuring party will go and how many entries you want to key to each table.

For example, let’s say you see a typical adventure in the Venom Abyss going to a depth of 10-15 locations. If you’re rolling 1d20 + depth, that means you’ll need to key at least 35 entries (the maximum roll on the die + the expected maximum depth of 15).

You’ll also want to think about the cap value (i.e., 35+ if you’re keying for 1d20 + 15 depth). Broadly speaking, you can either set a maximum effective depth (i.e., even if you go past depth 15, you just roll as if depth were 15) or you can have some sort of endgame result, such as:

• You arrive at Blood Mountain in the heart of the Venom Abyss.
• You have passed into the Underdark or out the far side of the forest.
• Reality itself begins to fray and break apart as you journey further into the Madlands of the Feywild.

You can also see how the group’s current depth creates a strata. If you’re rolling 1d10 + depth, for example, and you’re at depth 10, then you’ll have a “strata” of possible results from 11 to 20. Each change in depth changes the range of possible results, creating a “definition” of that strata that obviously overlaps with other depths: depths 10 and 11 are largely identical, but the difference between depth 5 and depth 10 is quite large, and the difference between depth 5 and depth 15 is complete.

Note: Hey! Couldn’t you just do a completely separate table for each individual depth so that every depth would be completely different from every other depth?

Sure! What you’re describing is actually quite similar to the dungeon level encounter tables from the original 1974 edition of D&D, but you may not find it particularly effective when used as part of a depthcrawl: Dungeon levels, for example, are filled with lots and lots of rooms, so you’ll use the level-based encounter tables repeatedly. In a depthcrawl, however, the PCs are almost always moving from one depth to another after just a single location, so you’d use all of your specialized tables only once-ish.

The other value you can play with is depth increment. Instead of increasing depth by just one point, you might instead increase it by 4 points (or 2 points or 5 points or whatever). The effect, obviously, is to more rapidly shift the group through the distinct strata of the depthcrawl. (Which can have the potentially negative result of either shortening the depthcrawl or requiring you to key much more material to handle much larger depths.)

Another technique you might consider is a depth pool. Instead of making a die roll + depth, you could instead roll a number of dice equal to the depth. For example, at depth 4 you might roll 4d6. This has the effect of rapidly increasing the average depth result while keeping lower results possible. (For example, each additional d6 of depth increases the average result by 3.5 and the maximum result by 6, but the minimum result by only 1. If you calculated a depth increment from the average of the roll, 4d6 would be equivalent to die roll + 14. But whereas die roll +14 has a minimum result of 15, the 4d6 roll obviously has a minimum result of 4.)

Note: You could mix-and-match different depth checks for different elements of the depthcrawl. For example, maybe you roll 1d20 + depth for locations, but roll 1d6 per depth for encounters, so that the location types throughout an area remain fairly constant, but the danger of encounters shifts rapidly.

RUNNING THE DEPTHCRAWL

When it comes to running the scenario, you can think of a depthcrawl as a kind of “cap system” for a pointcrawl: The core scenario structure is the pointcrawl itself. The depthcrawl is mostly added on top of that procedure in order to generate the pointcrawl map through play.

Start by creating the ENTRANCE:

• Make a depth check on the Locations (You start at Depth 0.)
• Make a depth check on the Details
• Roll on the Events

This is the location where the PCs enter the depthcrawl.

On each navigation turn, the PCs will choose one of three moves:

• Stay
• Go Deeper
• Go Back

If they STAY, they are remaining in their current location. Follow your normal procedures for that location.

• Make an encounter check.

If they GO DEEPER:

• Increase the group’s depth by one depth increment.
• Draw a path between their current location and the new location.
• Make a depth check on the Locations
• Make a depth check on the Details
• Roll on the Events
• Make an encounter check.

If they GO BACK, they travel along a path they’ve already explored to a location they’ve previously visited:

• Set the group’s depth to the established depth of the location.
• Make an encounter check.

You can choose to make this a player-known structure by telling the players that these are their three navigational options (stay, go deeper, go back), but they’re structurally broad enough that you can run the depthcrawl as a player-unknown structure by simply interpreting their navigational declarations according to the appropriate move.

(For example, if they say, “Let’s head down the river and see where it leads,” that’s Go Deeper. If they say, “Let’s search the mansion,” that’s Stay. If they say, “We should go back to the Old Mill,” that’s Go Back. Possibly multiple Go Backs, which you can resolve one at a time, depending on how many points they need to pass through to retrace their steps.)

A key thing to remember is that the depthcrawl is designed to cover a vast and enigmatic territory. In general, it should be assumed that there are any number of potential ways that PCs could enter or leave a location. The fact that they only have a binary choice (go deeper or go back) is not reflective of every location being a chokepoint; it’s that in the absence of navigational information the choice of direction is arbitrary.

As they explore, of course, they will be gaining navigational data (i.e., the paths which connection locations), and will then be able to make meaningful navigational choices.

Go to Part 2: Advanced Options