RCC asks:

I just ran my first game and got into a sticky situation: The NPC quest giver asked the party to clear the dungeon, but the PCs stopped after the first room and came back because the entrance to the second room was blocked. I ended up just having the quest giver pay them because I couldn’t figure out what to do. What should I have done?

It sounds like your players thought they’d accomplished their goal, but hadn’t. You can also run into this sort of situation if the PCs are deliberately trying to con their employer, of course, and the way you can handle it is largely identical.

It basically boils down to a broader GMing principle: Figure out the consequences of the PCs’ actions, then look for how those consequences can be vectored back to and intersect with the PCs’.

In this case, those consequences and that intersection is probably obvious and, in a long-term campaign, pretty easy to bring into play. For example, let’s say that the PCs were hired to clear out a mine infested with rust monsters. They told the person that hired them that the rust monsters were all gone, but they weren’t. What happens when the person who hired them discovers that?

An angry customer demanding that they finish the job might actually be the least of their problems! If the mine owner sent workers back into the mine believing that the dangerous creatures were no longer present, innocent people might have been killed. Has the mine owner been imprisoned due to endangerment? Are bounty hunters trying to round up the PCs to come testify? Does the brother of a slain miner try to track them down for a little vengeance?

Or flip it around and look at the consequences of the mine remaining closed: Does the local economy collapse? Was the silver flowing from the mine an essential income for a local duke, whose political power is damaged as a result of its loss?

Also: Where did those rust monsters come from? What consequences might there be from a herd of (breeding?) rust monsters having longer access to such a prolific feeding ground?

Your most immediate goal might just be to prompt the PCs to go back and finish the adventure, but often the splash back to their reputation and the ancillary fallout from their failures (or con jobs) can be just as interesting or even more interesting.

For a discussion of similar techniques, also check out Running the Campaign: Aftermath of Adventure.

ONE-SHOTS

If this scenario was being run as a one-shot, on the other hand, the real-world time pressure would obviously make it more difficult to explore all of these possibilities. So if I ran into this “whoops, they ditched the scenario” situation while running a one-shot, there are a couple things I’d look at.

First, did we already fill a goodly portion of our time and did everyone seem to have a good time? If so, it can be just fine to shrug and say, “Great adventure!”

On the other hand, if we have a whole bunch of time left in our slot and/or the experience seems unsatisfying, then I’d probably try to figure out how to let them know that they missed the adventure.

If you can figure out how to do that diegetically, great! For example, as the PCs — standing in the first room of the dungeon — conclude that the job was a lot easier than they thought it would be and make preparations to leave, that might be a great moment to have some hungry rust monsters, drawn by the smell of all the succulent metal the PCs are wearing, burst through whatever is blocking the entrance to the second room of the dungeon and attack!

But if you ultimately just need to say to the players out of character, “Hey, folks. The rest of the dungeon is on the other side of the boarded up passage with the signs saying, ‘KEEP OUT!’,” that’s not necessarily the end of the world.

Another way to do this, though, is to look at some of the long-term options you might use in a campaign and to the same thing, but at a faster pace!

For example, the PCs go back to town. They get paid. And then — BAM! — you skip a bunch of empty time and jump straight to, “We fast forward two weeks and the mine owner is in your face! ‘What game are y’all trying to play?! You only cleared out the first room!”

Then take a five minute break and use the time to sketch in a few new details to the dungeon suggesting the passage of time:

• The blockade has been removed by returning miners.
• Signs of fresh violence where the miners were surprised to encounter the rust monsters they were told had been cleared out.
• A creche or two of baby rust monsters that had time to be born because the PCs didn’t get the job done immediately, potentially complicating the situation in any number of ways.

And just like that, you’ve turned frustration into a fun and memorable scenario that’s made even more special because it came not only from you, but from the choices of your players!

Go to Ask the Alexandrian #1

S. & B. ask:

In the Dragon Heist Remix, what should I do if the PCs head to the Brandath Crypts and find the secret door leading to the vault doors early? My players found the references to the Cassalanters being interested in the Brandath Crypts at the converted windmill, went to check it out, and found the secret door. If they find the Vault this way, couldn’t they figure out how to open it without ever getting the Stone of Golorr and skip straight to the end of the campaign?

Converted Windmill → Crypt isn’t even the speed run of Dragon Heist. My players jumped directly from “the Zhentarim are interested in his mom’s necklace” → “we should check out his mom’s crypt” before they’d even gone to Trollskull Manor. They actually missed the check to find the secret passage in Lady Alethea’s Crypt by one point.

This created a huge payoff when they came back to the crypt at the end of the campaign: “Wait… we were standing right on top of it?!”

One thing you may notice is that the Brandath Crypts in the Alexandrian Remix of Dragon Heist are much more elaborate than those in the original adventure.

Here’s the original map:

And the revised map:

This is partly for lore reasons (demonstrating the long history of the Brandaths), but also because it places the Vault under ablative shielding. The PCs will

• Need to figure out the Crypt is involved.
• Need to find the secret door.
• Once through the secret door, find the opened secret compartment from which the Cassalanters took the Eye. (This is a red herring that can cause groups to stop looking, particularly if they come from the converted windmill: “Oh. This is where they found what they came here for.”)
• Need to find the second hidden passage behind the illusion.
• Need to figure out how to open the Vault. (Without direct access to a legend lore spell through the Stone of Golorr, so they’ll either need to call in a favor or get clever.)

You know how you use the Three Clue Rule to create robust connections? This is basically the exact opposite of that: We’re deliberately designing a chain of fragile connections, with the high expectation that at least one of these chains will break, turning the PCs away (but also rewarding them later with the cool, “We were so close!” reveal).

Okay, but what if the chain doesn’t break, the PCs do all of those things, and they get into the Vault “early”?

100% let it happen. And then play to find out.

First, your players are going to think this is the most amazing thing that has ever happened to them at the gaming table. I guarantee it. Plus, they’re going to trust you implicitly as a GM for the rest of eternity. On top of that, just think about the story they’re going to have to tell other D&D players?

In my opinion, even if you had to throw out the rest of the campaign, it would still be worth it.

It’ll be like my players telling the story of how they beat the Tomb of Horrors by casting locate object on their stolen stuff, drilling a hole through the wall, and using gaseous form to loot the treasury. Except on steroids.

If you’ve ever wanted to run a campaign that your player will remember forever, this is how you do it. My wife still talks about another campaign where she convinced the rest of her group to unexpectedly double back, confront the secret villainess, and completely derailed the Epic Quest™ the PCs were supposed to be embarking on.

But also, if you’re running the Dragon Heist Remix, you won’t have to throw out the rest of the campaign, because, second, the rest of the campaign is still in motion.

One of the great things about prepping situations instead of plots and then actively playing those situations is that, even when those situations go in a completely unexpected direction… you can just keep playing.

You’ve found the money. What do you do with it? How do you get it out of the Vault? These questions are often trivialized at the end of a Dragon Heist campaign because the PCs have taken some factions off the board and made alliances with others. But if they breach the vault early, all of these factions will still be fully active and likely mysterious to the PCs.

To take an easy example, the Cassalanters still need this money to save their kids. Just because the money isn’t in the Vault any more doesn’t mean that the Cassalanters aren’t still going to be trying to get their hands on it.

The Stone of Golorr is still in play. Even if the Stone is no longer required to find Neverember’s stolen money, it’s still a pretty big deal in its own right. It’s a powerful artifact filled with secrets and capable of incredible things. Most or all of the people who were looking for it will still be looking for it!

In other words, the Grand Game is still very much in play. And there can be some absolutely fascinating stuff that comes out of the PCs suddenly being flush with a small fortune while still pursuing the Stone of Golorr:

• How does their wealth change their relationship with the various factions?
• What resources can they purchase to further their goals?
• If they use the money for unrelated purchases, what are the consequences?

Flow with what’s happening and keep actively playing the situation. The Remix gives you the tools you need to keep reacting and keep playing.

In “How the Remix Works,” for example, there’s a simple checklist for the GM to follow as a default option:

1. Are the PCs looking for a lead to one of the Eyes? If yes, pick a Faction Outpost and point them at it.

2. Did the PCs just piss off one of the Factions? If yes, pick a Faction Response Team and have them target the PCs.

3. Are the PCs floundering and don’t know what to do next? If yes, pick a Faction Response Team and have them targe the PCs. (If you’re not sure how they might target the PCs, just have them show up and try to kill them.)

Repeat until the campaign is done.

What’s notable is that even with a huge curveball like “they opened the Vault at the beginning of the campaign,” this checklist still just… works.

Here’s a few key questions to think about, though:

• Who knows that the PCs have the money / know the location of the Vault? (This includes both “friendly” and villainous factions.)
• What do they do about that? (Try to steal it? Ask for a donation? Recommend that they return it to the city government?)
• As the PCs spend the money, what happens as a result of their purchases?

The other thing to think about is how the instigating action / scenario hook for the Grand Game might shift as a result of the PCs’ altered trajectory.

In the campaign as written, the assumption is that the PCs are known for rescuing Renaer and are also known to operate out of Trollskull Manor. Therefore, Dalakhar goes looking for them at Trollskull Manor and gets blown up in the fireball.

If the PCs are instead known to have somehow gotten access to the Vault, then maybe Dalakhar is actually coming to Trollskull Manor with a message from Neverember about the money. The message could actually be found on his body after the explosion. (This could result in Neverember being more directly active in the Grand Game, an option we’ve previously discussed.)

You might also have one or more factions (e.g., the Gralhunds) assume that if the PCs got access to the Vault, it must mean that they have the Stone of Golorr! Maybe the PCs find themselves under nimblewright surveillance! Maybe Emmek Frewn and his wererats get recruited to help keep tabs on them.

If you were running a prepped plot, then the PCs skipping to the end would break all your prep. But the Dragon Heist Remix reorganized the plot into a toybox. The Vault and the treasure inside it are positioned as a natural goal for the campaign, but they’re ultimately still positioned as toys: If the PCs pull them out and starting playing with them a little “early,” it doesn’t stop you – or them! – from continuing to play with all of the other toys!

Go to Ask the Alexandrian #16

M. asks:

I want to run a post-apocalyptic campaign with the PCs stuck in the middle of a war between multiple factions, but I’m struggling to set it up. I want a lot of inter-factional politics and for the struggle just to survive to be a big part of things. The PCs should start as grunts, but I’d like them to get more involved in the decision-making later on. I’ve read So You Want to Be a Game Master, but what do I actually prep? Should I write up the whole military campaign as a hexcrawl?

To get started, let’s keep it simple.

Your campaign is going to start with an EPISODIC STRUCTURE with mission-based scenarios: The PCs are grunts. Maybe for a specific military. Maybe as part of a small band of scavengers trying to survive w while the larger war rages around them. Or maybe they’re mercs getting orders from different factions each week.

Regardless, your basic scenario hook is simple: They get orders to DO A THING from their commanding officer or scavenge elder or whatever.

And, from that, the basic rhythm of play will flow pretty naturally: They go and do the thing (or fail to do the thing). Then they go back to their commanding officer and they get their next mission.

Each MISSION is a scenario. You told me you have So You Want to Be a Game Master, and that book is primarily designed around scenario structures — how to design and run different types of scenarios.

DUNGEON SCENARIOS

• The enemy has dug a tunnel network; we need you to go and clear it out.
• We’ve discovered an old Fallout-style Vault. We need you to explore it and verify there’s no enemy presence.

RAID SCENARIOS

• We need you to take out the enemy’s mobile transmission tower.
• We’ve found a secret tunnel going into Base Frozen Alpha. Use the tunnel to infiltrate the base, then lower the shields.

And so forth.

As a general rule, though, giving the PCs a specific objective, but leaving the players free to figure out HOW they want to achieve that goal will result in more interesting and engaging scenarios.

After running a couple of these missions, you might want to get a little fancy by experimenting with surprising scenario hooks. (For example, the PCs are sent to clear out a tunnel network suspected to be infested with enemies, but when they arrive they instead find it full of refugees. What do they do?)

But mostly you can keep it straightforward. Expect to run at least a half dozen of these scenarios to kick things off. During this time you’ll be learning a lot about the game, scenario design, your group, etc. Design each new mission based on (a) what the PCs are doing, (b) how their actions are affecting the world, and (c) what the PCs’ goals are/become.

• Look at things they care about, put them at risk, and say: “How do you save them?”
• Plague them with hardship (an enemy has infested their food supply with a bio-weapon), listen to the solutions they propose (“let’s raid their food depots!”), and then design the next scenario so that they can go and do that.

Along these same lines, have the mission outcomes be big and meaningful:

• If they find a large cache of rations, make a point of how the lives of their scavenge band have improved. Little Timmy, who was all skin-and-bones, is actually looking healthy!
• If they fail to take out an enemy communication tower, their unit gets ambushed. Now they’re on the run, pushed back by the enemy (and we need to scout out Death Rock Canyon to make sure there aren’t any muties laying an ambush before we can escape through it!) and their friends are crippled or dead.

Honestly, you could run the whole campaign like this and accomplish a lot of what you want to accomplish, but after running a bunch of episodic scenarios, you may be in a place where you want to reposition the PCs from “somebody tells you what to do” to “you need to figure out what to do.” This means putting the players in the driver’s seat so that you can directly engage them with the type of deep conflicts and meaningful choices you want to happen in this campaign.

This is the point where you’ll need to transition to a different campaign structure.

The first thing you’ll need to do, though, is look at how this shift happens diegetically: The PCs have been taking orders, now they’re not. Why?

• Maybe the leaders of their scavenger band get assassinated when they go to a meeting. Or blown up by a radiation bomb. However it happens, the PCs are now in charge of the scavenger band.
• If they’re military grunts, maybe they get assigned as an advanced scout team to explore a new region (where they’ll largely be autonomous in their operations).

You might plan ahead for this, but the nature of the diegetic shift may also develop organically through play.

The second thing, in my opinion, if you’re going to have the players making big, strategic choices that will affect the course of the war, then you need to give them some sort concrete structure to base those choices on.

This doesn’t have to be super robust. You don’t need to design a fully functional 4X strategy game. But you want something that will guide your own rulings and, by extension, let them make meaningful choices instead of just trying to influence your whim.

The most basic structure here is:

• A list of resources (food, ammunition, etc.) and where they’re produced/storehoused.
• A list of infrastructure (population/settlements, military units, etc.) and the cost in resources to maintain it per month, season, year, or whatever other time period makes sense.
• An understanding that a resource shortfall will result in either severe consequences for a piece of infrastructure or cause that infrastructure to collapse entirely.

The exact lists you use here will depend a lot on what you’ve discovered about the world, game, players, and characters while running the episodic portion of the campaign. (And you can actually start laying the groundwork for this stuff and experimenting a bit before the PCs are in a decision-making position.)

I recommend also adding FACTION DOWNTIME to this. A system for this is included in So You Want to be a Game Master, p. 342, and you should be able to adapt it pretty easily. The basic idea is that various factions will have agendas and they’ll be able to pursue those agendas as the campaign clock ticks forward. It’ll be up to the PCs to figure out which agendas they want to support, which they oppose, and which they ignore.

Since this is a military campaign, it’s also likely that you’ll want some sort of structure/system for resolving MASS BATTLES. What exactly this will look like will likely depend a lot on which RPG system you’re using and how large the conflict really is, but it’s once again something that doesn’t have to be super complicated in order to be effective.

Finally, make sure that (a) these three structures are linked to each other (e.g. specific faction projects should require specific resources; claiming those resources — or denying them to another faction — will likely require military action) and (b) the PCs can still take meaningful individual actions (i.e., go on adventures) to influence and/or participate in each structure (e.g., instead of a military action, they can go on an adventure to get the necessary resources; they can participate in the battles; they can provide security for the scientists researching the lunar lycanthrope raygun).

Along these lines, at this stage of the campaign (or perhaps even earlier), you may it useful to start experimenting with troupe-style play, in which each player controls a stable of characters and chooses which character they’ll play in each scenario depending on what the focus of the scenario is.

Go to Ask the Alexandrian #14

SPOILERS FOR DRAGON HEIST

Matu67 asks:

I’m running Waterdeep: Dragon Heist (Alexandrian remix), and I’m wondering: How do you improvise sources of information?

For example, a faction knows that character X did Y, but the DM hasn’t written down the reason why the faction knows this. When the players ask the faction, “How did you come across this piece of info?”, what do I say as the DM?

In Dragon Heist, for example, the Cassalanters know that Dalakhar was carrying the Stone of Golorr, and the DM is encouraged to give this information to the PCs if the PCs ally with them. Then the PCs ask, “Hey, Cassalanters, how do you know that?” And then I freeze up.

We can start here by getting down to the most basic ontology of the question:

How do we know things?

In this case, how does a faction in an RPG scenario — like the Cassalanters — know stuff? Where does that information come from?

Well, broadly speaking, they will have agents. (In an espionage campaign like Dragon Heist these might be literal secret agents, but generally we just mean anyone who’s a member of the faction or working with the faction.) For a faction to “know” something, it means that these agents will have either witnessed it directly or they’ll have learned the information from someone who did.

For example, “How do you know the Potenska Apocrypha can be found in the Ebon Library?”

Either someone saw the book in the Ebon Library themselves, or they’ve spoken to a scholar / read a reference to the Apocrypha in another book / cast a commune spell and been informed by the gods that the book is there.

To forge that connection, start with: Who definitely knows about the thing you’re trying to source?

For example, who knows that Dalakhar has the Stone of Golorr? Well, Dalakhar, obviously. But also, since he stole the Stone from Xanathar, members of Xanathar’s gang would know.

Who knows that the Potenska Papers are in the Ebon Library? Well… librarians, right? And probably other scholars who have seen it there? (To this general list, you could potentially also add any specific NPCs who you know have visited the Ebon Library.)

At this point, you have two options for creating the data trail.

First: If it’s possible the agents could have directly witnessed the information, then problem solved. You’re done. (e.g., “When I visited the Ebon Library, I saw the Potenska Papers in their collection.”)

You can flesh this out by providing an explanation for why they were there. (e.g., “When I was at the Ebon Library researching a summoning ritual for Demogorgon, I saw the Potenska Papers in their collection.”) The great thing is that, in an espionage scenario, you can almost always default to “…because they were spying on them” as the explanation. (e.g., “Our spy in Xanathar’s hideout was there because they were spying on Xanathar.”)

Second: If agents couldn’t have directly witnessed the information, then you just need to connect the agents to the people who do.

In some cases, it will be easier – or more fun! – if you imagine this happening in multiple steps. (For example, X talked to Y and the conversation was overheard by Z. Or the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence intercepted communication between a US Senator and the Lytekkas Corporation, which was scooped up from a vulnerable server during a Mossad operation, and we grabbed it from them because we’ve got a worm installed in their Tel Aviv data center.)

But you don’t usually need to over-complicate it. A single step is usually more than enough.

For example, “We have an informant in Xanathar’s gang, and he was sent out as part of a team to find Dalakhar and retrieve the Stone.” Or, “One of our agents intercepted written orders that were sent to Xanatharian agents to be on the look out for Dalakhar and to retrieve the Stone he carried.” Or, “I hired a Sage of Orthoria to research the Potenska Papers, and they found a reference to a copy that was given to the Ebon Library.”

If the players want to dig even deeper – e.g., “Who is this agent?” – an espionage campaign usually gives you the luxury of waving them off. (“Their identity is confidential. I’m sure you can understand that revealing it could potentially put them in danger.”)  On the other hand, there’s often no harm in satisfying their curiosity: If you know who the agent is, great If not, then it’s time to reach for your list of NPC names and spin somebody up.

This may also be a good point to figure out why the players are so insistent about digging into this data trail. (This is a slightly hidden case of making sure you know the intention of an action before resolving the action.) For example, maybe they want to question the Cassalanters’ informant; or maybe they just want to make sure they don’t accidentally kill them when they raid Xanathar’s hideout. Maybe the reason they want access to the original Tel Aviv intercept is because they want to run a data analysis and see if they can identify the location of the IP address the message was originally sent from.

Once you know what they’re actually looking for, it becomes a lot easier to aim your improv.

The way to do this, of course, is to simply ask them!

You might be able to do that in character – for example, the Cassalanters ask them why it’s so important for them to know the identity of their informant. But, as the GM, you can also just ask the players directly what their goal is.

Go to Ask the Alexandrian #13

M. writes:

With everything going on in Israel and Gaza, I’m struggling with my game. I know too many people who have been affected by the war. The idea of running fantasy raids and having monsters kidnap villagers and innocent people being threatened by dragon fire just isn’t fun right now.

I’ve been running my current campaign for over a year, and we’ve been building up political intrigue, abductions by slavers, secret cults, and a simmering civil war… And I just don’t know what to do.

Do you have any advice? Where do I go next? What sorts of adventures could I run?

The trap you’re feeling stuck in is the ubiquitous combat structures that are the default structure and backbone of play for most RPGs. I talk about this in Game Structures, and also the way in which play tends to gravitate towards structure. Combat is what most RPGs give you, so both your adventures and the actions of your players gravitate towards it.

It can be tough to think outside of that box, but your question about what types of adventures you could run instead shows that you’re already heading in that direction. Personally, the first thing I’d look at would be some sort of mystery scenario. Mysteries are flexible and also very conducive to combat-free scenarios. (Or, if combat is featured, it can be structured to not resemble the real world events you don’t want to be reminded of.)

You may be able to pivot the ongoing events of your campaign into a scenario you won’t find problematic, but given the prevailing themes and threads you describe, it’s probably going to be hard to get away from it entirely. So I strongly suspect that you and your group need to take a break.

There are a couple of approaches you can take for this.

First, you might be able to take a break within your current campaign with something like a beach episode. This is a concept from anime/manga, where all the main characters in the series head to the beach together. This usually involves hitting the Pause button on all of the current, ongoing story lines.

You don’t literally need to take your campaign to the beach, of course. (Although you could.) The point is to contrive a reason for your PCs to all hit the Pause button on whatever they’re doing and go do something else for a while, and this will likely be easiest to do if it’s accompanied by a change of venue. They could be:

• Sent somewhere by a patron to deal with a problem.
• Invited to a grand party.
• Sucked through a portal into a demiplane.
• Get sent back through time to explore an historical epoch.

The second option is to literally put your campaign on pause. Take a break for a few sessions and run some one-shots or a short campaign. This might be a good opportunity to experiment with some new games you haven’t played before. Zero-prep games like Lady Blackbird or Technoir would be the first place I’d personally start looking, and it might also be a great time to check out some more “experimental” games that aren’t based in the tropes of pulp fiction at all.

Regardless of which option you choose, I’d frame things up by having an open conversation with your players about where you’re at personally and why you need to take a break from the campaign. Discuss the options you’re comfortable running and get their input on what you should do next.

From a purely practical standpoint, make a point of setting a specific date when you’ll revisit the discussion and see if you, and everyone else, is ready to go back to the main campaign. Aim low for this (e.g., “let’s take a break for the next month” or “we’ll touch base again once we finish up our mini-campaign on Kepler Station”). You don’t want to wait too long, because then the campaign might just fade away. And if it turns out that it’s still too soon, you can always kick the can further down the road when the time comes.

Go to Ask the Alexandrian #12