Go to Campaign Status Documents

As I mentioned in my original article describing the use of campaign status documents, every campaign is unique and that means that the campaign status document for every campaign will be a little different. This series will be taking a closer look at some of the very specific tools I’ve developed and used for campaign status documents over the years, including examples drawn from actual play, and it will certainly make more sense if you’re familiar with campaign status documents.

I’m going to refer to these as campaign status modules. And, as I say, there’s nothing sacrosanct about them. The whole point is to take this stuff and adapt it, molding it to whatever the immediate needs of your current campaign are.

Also, importantly, I’ve never had a campaign status document that featured ALL of the modules we’ll be talking about. You really want to identify the stuff that you need and use that. (And only that.) Including stuff that you don’t need actually creates a negative value, filling your status document with a bunch of cruft that makes it harder to maintain the vital material and use it during play.

TRACKING DUNGEONS

I’d like to start by taking a peek at how I track dungeon status. This is a form of scenario update, and I did take a look at quite a few of the techniques I use in the original article.

• adversary rosters
• updated room keys
• scenario timelines
• return to the status quo

What I’d like to do here is look at some specific examples of this in practice.

The first thing is that, as with everything else on the campaign status document, you can and should keep it simple: Just because you have all of these tools available for tracking dungeon status, it doesn’t follow that you need to use them all. For example, here’s what the dungeon status for the Kolat Towers in my Dragon Heist campaign looked like in the Session 13 status document:

5.4 ZHENTARIM – KOLAT TOWERS

• Mimic killed.

• K12: Two destroyed staffs.

This was all that was needed given the changes that the PCs had affected at that point.

As more details are needed, the tools I most commonly invoke are the adversary roster and updated room key.

Prepping a dungeon around an adversary roster not only makes it much, much easier to run the dungeon as a dynamic environment, it also makes updating the dungeon incredibly easy: The things most likely to change about a dungeon, after all, are its denizens. During play you can easily update the roster as necessary (e.g., crossing off casualties). Then, between sessions, you can simply update the roster, put the current version in your status document, and ignore the original.

The flipside of this coin are the physical fixtures of the dungeon. The updated room key is a simple “diff file” that reminds you of any changes that have been made because of the PCs’ actions. (For example, if they rip a door off its hinges, then I should try to remember that next time they pass through that room.) I generally find that I don’t need more then one or two sentences to jog my memory for this kind of stuff.

Here’s an example update sheet for a dungeon from Monte Cook’s Banewarrens campaign:

CURRENT ENTOURAGE (10/20/790)

BW08 – LOCATION STATUS

• AREA 12: Great white shark corpse on edge of Conflagration (partially eaten by slaadi).

• AREA 12 – CAVE: Bison carcass.

• AREA 21: Xorn refuses to make alliance with the Golden One.

(The xorn here is listed in the key rather than the adversary roster because it won’t leave Area 21 under most circumstances.)

Design Note: In these notes, “BW08” is an alphanumeric code I use to refer to this specific adventure. (In the Dragon Heist example, “5.4” fulfills the same function.) These codes help me organize my notes and, as you can see here, make it easy to cross-reference the scenario (either in my campaign status document or another scenario).

The final piece of the puzzle, scenario timelines, are tied to the concept of status quo design: The dungeon exists in a literal or effective state of status quo (i.e., how it is described in your initial adventure notes) until it is perturbed by the PCs. For example:

• 10/05/790: Tee attacks Temple of Deep Chaos.
• 10/06/790: Tee unleashes nightmare on Arveth, leaving her fatigued next day.
• 10/07/790: Arveth hits Tee with Dais of Vengeance.
• 10/08/790: Tee unleashes nightmare on Arveth, leaving her fatigued next day.
• 10/09/790: Arveth switches sleeping pattern so that she won’t be asleep at night.
• 10/10/790 (4 AM): Arveth hits Tee with Dais of Vengeance (forced to watch her friends’ eyes ripped out).
• 10/10/790 (11 PM): Rissien and Santiel are kidnapped from Narred and taken to Temple of Deep Chaos.
• 10/13/790: Santiel is blinded.
• 10/14/790: Santiel’s eyes delivered to Tee.
• 10/15/790: Santiel is killed.
• 10/16/790: Rissien suspended in Kaleidoscope Temple.
• 10/21/790: Rissien is killed. (Possibly rescued by Dark Leaf.)

I use strikeout text to indicate events that have already happened. In some cases I’ll simply delete these entries, but I’ve too often found that it can be essential to easily reference this past continuity during play. In fact, for many types of actions, it’s far more efficient to simply list what happened (and then describing things accordingly) rather than trying to account for every individual change in the key.

It follows, of course, that the items which have not been struck out are stuff that hasn’t happened yet. They may, in fact, never happen. (If, for example, Tee catches up with Arveth before she can kidnap Rissien and Santiel.) Such events are generally based on the intentions and plans of the NPCs, and prepping them can be smart if (a) they’re sufficiently complex or convoluted that it will be valuable to puzzle them out between sessions, (b) juggling all the off-screen actions of the NPCs would be too difficult to handle during play, and/or (c) they would involve some form of additional prep (new stat blocks, physical props, etc.) that can’t be improvised during the session.

Once I start rolling out timelines, there are two key questions I ask:

• When is it likely that the PCs will re-engage with this dungeon? I won’t prep timelines much beyond that point because the likelihood of wasted prep becomes high.
• If the PCs don’t further interact with this dungeon, what will the new status quo be?

The latter question can be easy to overlook, but is a really essential component of efficient, smart prep. Some situations will just continue to spiral out of control (spinning their chaos out into the rest of the campaign), but a lot of scenarios will instead settle down into a status quo (e.g., the mafiosos bring in new muscle to guard their drug operation and then… that’s it, they’ve taken the precautions they think they need to take). You can simply prep up to that new status quo, file it in the appropriate section of your campaign notes, and then stop thinking about it until it becomes relevant again.

Next: Restocking Checklists

Go to Table of Contents

The Alexandrian Remix of Descent Into Avernus utilizes a number of additional books from Wizards of the Coast, the DM’s Guild, and other third-party content. (This wealth of support material is one of the great things about using published D&D campaigns.)

By popular demand, here’s an authoritative list of all the resources referenced/required by the Avernus Remix (not including Descent Into Avernus itself).

AVERNIAN HEXCRAWL

The hex key for the Avernian Hexcrawl includes locations referencing these books:

Warlords of Avernus
Forges of Avernus
Bitter Rivals
Dance of Deathless Frost
Vysianter’s Guide to the Red Wastes of Avernus
Tyrants of the Purple City
Encounters in Avernus
Infernal Encounters
Ruined Prospects
Diabolical Dive
Infernal Insurgency
Abyssal Incursion
Temple of the Broken Prince

Note that several of these were used for a single location and could be swapped out if you don’t want to go whole hog.

AVERNIAN RANDOM ENCOUNTERS

The Avernian random encounter tables pull demons and devils from a wide array of awesome monster manuals:

Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes
Volo’s Guide to Monsters
Encounters in Avernus
Infernal Encounters
Emirikol’s Guide to Devils
Scientific Secrets of Avernus
Book of Fiends 5E
Avernus Rising: Fang & Claw

REVIEWS

If you’d like more information about the books listed above, most of them were detailed as part of the reviews series done as part of the Avernus Remix:

Capsule Reviews: DMs Guild
Capsule Reviews: Rhodarin Avernus
Capsule Reviews: Adventurers League (Season 9)

Links above are affiliate links and help support the Alexandrian! Hope this helps!

The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library are a pair of depthcrawl mini-campaigns by Emmy “Cavegirl” Allen. It would probably be more accurate to describe them as THE depthcrawl mini-campaigns, since the entire depthcrawl concept was invented by Allen for these books.

The Gardens of Ynn came first. A 79-page, PDF-only book with fairly crude productions values, but golden content. The Stygian Library was more or less the sameF, but a 2020 Kickstarter saw this book revamped with gorgeous gothic illustrations and a deluxe printed edition.

INTO THE GARDENS

One day you may find a strange door in a garden. It wasn’t there yesterday. It may not be there tomorrow. But today it looks as if it’s been there for a hundred years, and above it are written the words The Garden of Ynn by way of Whiteoak. Or Hobbiton. Or Waterdeep. Or Bywater-Under-the-Bay.

On the other side of the door is a different garden. A strange and feyish place of glass-roofed mausoleums, singing orchards, and frozen silk-gardens. Haunting these hedgerows are bonsai turtles, giant caterpillars, animated chessmen, and ferocious white apes. And if you choose to go exploring – to go deeper – there are stranger things to be found as the skein of the garden peels back: steam pipes and splicing vats and the vivisection theatre.

LOST IN THE LIBRARY

“Put enough books in one place, and they distort the world.” The Stygian Library is that place between worlds towards which any building stacked high with books (or scrolls or tomes) is bent. Pass between the shelves, explore the chambers of learning, and you may find yourself passing to another realm where the rows of shelves continue without end.

Here there are chained books, silent printing presses, time-locked vaults, and spirit planetariums, all carefully attended by the five Orders of Librarians – Red, Yellow, Black, White, and Grey – who pursue a secret agenda that is somehow related to the spirit tubes and phantom pumps that seem to lace the library’s hidden ways.

Because the Library connects all great stores of knowledge across the multiverse, the answers to almost any question you might ask can be found here… and this is precisely what will lure many into its dusty halls.

WHAT IS A DEPTHCRAWL?

I’ve written up a detailed overview of depthcrawls, but here’s the quickie version: Depthcrawls are a method for procedurally generating an exploration scenario. Each keyed site is created by randomly combining three or four different elements:

• Location
• Detail
• Event
• Encounter

So, for example, in the Stygian Library you might generate:

• Reading Lounge
• Funeral Urns
• Footprints, Litter, Notes, & Other Signs of Passage
• 5 crawling things

These are not, it should be noted, simply enigmatic entries on a random table: Each element is supported by a meaty, play-oriented entry. And so, in this case, I know that the PCs find an assortment of funerary urns arranged around a comfortable room with richly upholstered couches and elegant coffee tables. From several of these urns, there are footprints leading away from them… and as I’ve generated “crawling things” as the encounter, it’s reasonable to intuit that these “foot” prints belong to crawling things which have somehow emerged from the ashes within the urns.

Or perhaps something completely different.

That’s the beautiful alchemy of the depthcrawl: In the process of bringing these disparate elements together (both with each other and with the current circumstances and continuity of the campaign), you – as the GM – will be performing a constant series of creative closures, making every journey into either the Garden of Ynn or the Stygian Library utterly unique. In practice, it very much feels as if you an Allen are engaged in a beautiful dance, your own creative impulses – and those of your players – swirling endlessly with the raw fodder of these setting/adventure books to summon forth something truly magical.

As the PCs journey deeper (into either Garden or Library), their current “depth” serves as a modifier on the random tables, slowly pushing the results towards both greater terrors and terrifying truths.

LIMINAL SPACES

The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library are in some ways completely different from each other, but in many others are clearly cut from the same cloth. Indeed, one might say that they are superficially distinct, but unified by a common soul.

What they most essentially share in common is a fey-ish tone that I would describe as “a somber funhouse.”

Funhouse dungeons are designed like carnival rides: Whatever wild whims seize their GM are thrust together, usually with a wacky or comedic result. Ynn and the Library are built to similar effect, but their sense of the absurd is a deliberate invocation of an inhuman and alien environment beyond mortal ken; it hews true to the spirit of Alice in Wonderland, which seeks enlightenment in madness.

“Don’t look too close,” says the funhouse dungeon. “We’re just here to have fun!”

“Look very close,” says Ynn and the Library. “For what could be more fun than the absurdity of truth?”

WHO CAN VISIT THE GARDENS & LIBRARY?

The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library are OSR products, designed for that vague smear of pre-1985 D&D and/or the many clones and near-clones of those games which have appeared over the last couple decades.

Personally, I ran The Gardens of Ynn for 5^th Edition without any great deal of difficulty. The most troublesome bit are the monster stat blocks, but you can achieve a great deal with some simple re-skinning. Honestly, the adventures find such a unique vibe that any GM with moderate experience could probably easily use them in a wide variety of systems and settings with little difficulty: Numenera, Savage Worlds, Monsterhearts, etc.

QUIBBLES

The Gardens of Ynn and the original edition The Stygian Library both list their locations, details, and so forth in the order that they appear on the random tables. In my experience, this made it unnecessarily difficult to find the entries for stuff as I generated it. Someone appears to have figured this out, however, and the revised edition of The Stygian Library alphabetizes everything.

… that’s it for my quibbles.

CONCLUSION

Either or both of these books get my highest recommendation.

I’ve run The Gardens of Ynn several times, including with the Alexandrian Game Club, and it’s been a smashing success every time. I described it as a “beautiful alchemy” above, and that really is the experience of running it at the table. It’s been such a wonderful experience that I’m looking into the possibility of launching an open table with the campaign.

It’s not just the depthcrawl itself, which is a very nifty structure for procedural content generation. It’s Emmy Allen’s crystal-clear creative vision, which effortlessly flows from the page directly into your campaign with soul-searing pathos, innocent whimsy, and a delightfully surprising pulp steampunk.

If you’d like to see what this looks like in practice, I’ve done a video on Twitch demonstrating a simulated run of what using the book looks like from the GM perspective.

Regardless, these are both books you should pick up as soon as your pocketbook allows!

GARDENS OF YNN

Style: 3
Substance: 5

Authors: Emmy “Cavegirl” Allen
Publisher: Dying Stylishly Games
Cost: $5 (PDF)
Page Count: 79

STYGIAN LIBRARY (Revised)

Style: 5
Substance: 5

Authors: Emmy “Cavegirl” Allen
Publisher: SoulMuppet Publishing
Cost: $30 (Physical) / $9 (PDF)
Page Count: 160

Go to Part 1

Your rumor table should be a living document. The latest gossip, after all, is alluring because it’s topical, and the enigma of the table will degrade as PCs learn its content. Here are a few techniques for keeping it fresh.

SAME RUMOR, NEW CONTEXT

When you give a rumor to the PCs, cross it off the list. If you roll the same rumor again, you may want to roll again (until you get a rumor the PCs haven’t heard yet). Being aware that you’ve given this specific rumor previously, however, you might simply make a point of finding a different spin or variation on the information the PCs already have. (For example, if they’ve previously heard that a wyvern has been attacking travelers along the Southway, they might hear about a different group of travelers being attacked. Or from a group of explorers who saw the wyvern flying over the Red Plateau.)

Tip: In an open table campaign, the fact that one PC has heard a rumor doesn’t necessarily mean that the rumor will have truly “entered” the campaign. That PC might never be played again, and there may be lots of other PCs who never even meet that PC (for all of whom the rumor would still be completely new). It may be slightly less obvious that the same thing can be true in a dedicated campaign, as players may forget or simply lose track of a rumor they’ve previously heard. This is what makes the “same rumor, new context” technique so useful, as it can be used to reintroduce the same information in an organic, rather than repetitive, way.

REMOVE AND REPLACE

Alternatively, once a rumor has been heard, you can cross it off your rumor list and replace it with a new one.

You’ll also likely want to replace rumors that are no longer applicable (e.g., someone has killed the wyvern, so it won’t be attacking people along the Southway any more).

You may also want to periodically replace a random selection of rumors (whether they’ve been heard or not) just to keep the rumor tables fresh.

Tip: You can combine these techniques. For example, you might cross out rumors when they’re heard, but only replace them once per month (finding new contexts if they get repeated before then). Or just keep them until they get randomly cycled out.

EVOLVE SITUATIONS

When you’re updating your rumor tables, it’s an opportunity to both evolve ongoing situations in the campaign world and give the PCs a vector for learning about it.

• A wyvern has been seen flying over the Red Plateau.
• The wyvern is now attacking travelers along the Southway.
• The wyvern has attacked a tax assessor’s wagon and carried off a lockbox containing 7,000 sp.

These situations, of course, don’t need to be limited to stuff that was previously seeded on the rumor table. There’s likely lots of stuff happening in your campaign.

CURRENT EVENTS

On a similar note, a rumor table can be stocked with current events and gossip. When you’re restocking, you may want to drop older events and add new ones to enhance the sense of time passing in the campaign world.

Tip: You can think of the rumor table as having certain “slots.” For example, entries 1-4 on the table might be current events; 5-10 point to random hexes; 11-14 refer to random encounters; and 15-20 being where everything else gets placed. This can help make sure that the table remains varied and “balanced” in its content, while also making it easy to, for example, swap out your current events.

RESPOND TO PC ACTIONS

PCs tend to do lots of big, splashy stuff (like killing wyverns) that are exactly the sort of thing people tend to gossip about. So when they do something notable, add it (or the situation that evolves out of it) to the rumor table.

Players love this. (“Hey! That was us!”) It makes them feel important and it’s a great of showing that their choices are meaningful and their actions have consequences. And the possibilities are almost limitless:

• With the wyvern slain, trade along the Southway has boomed. The caravan activity has outstripped the capacity of the Patrol Guild and they’re looking for freelance guards willing to ride with smaller caravans to Maernoc.
• Lord Erequad has issued a bounty for the adventurers who are believed to have stolen the tax assessor’s lockbox (which was originally taken by the wyvern).
• Four hungry baby wyverns have been seen hunting on the Red Plateau.

In a great hexcrawl campaign, the adventure never ends and the rumor table is constantly driving the world forward.

Back to 5E Hexcrawls

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