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

SPOILERS FOR DRAGON HEIST

A.M. asks:

One of my players is going to be leaving my Dragon Heist remix campaign soon. It’s currently five days before Trollskull Manor’s grand opening and two days before the fireball. We have two more sessions with her, and I have another player lined up to replace her when she leaves, but I’m not sure if it’d be better to pad things out a bit so the new player is part of the group when the fireball goes off; or breeze through and have the fireball with the old player still there.

There are three things I would consider here:

1. Is there any way that I can give the departing player a satisfying send-off?
2. How am I going to hook the new player in?
3. Is there any reason the new player can’t join before the old player leaves? (Which immediately alleviates any sequencing woes that might interfere with the best answers for #1 and #2.)

For the send-off, I’m looking for some kind of conclusion. Some dramatic note that allows this specific player to feel like their experience in the campaign is “complete.” This is, of course, good for the player leaving, but I think it’s also important for the other players, because it provides a sense of closure.

Generally speaking, this is going to boil down to either a major milestone in the campaign or it’s going to be about resolving a personal goal. In either case, though, you want to focus on what you know about the specific player: What stuff do they seem to care most about in the campaign?

MILESTONES

In terms of a milestone, for example, you’re in a somewhat awkward point of the Dragon Heist campaign where one set of objectives has been completed, but the next phase of the campaign hasn’t really kicked off.

If there’s not a natural milestone sitting right there, however, then sometimes you can fast-track a milestone. For example, if you think the nimblewright investigation could get wrapped up in a couple sessions (including the Gralhund raid), then you might fast-track the fireball and have it go off immediately. Discovering the culprits (Gralhunds) and recovering the Stone (albeit not its Eyes) might be a nice, satisfying milestone.

Alternatively, maybe this player seems to be really invested in Trollskull Manor. If so, focusing on the grand opening as their big conclusion might be the milestone you need. This might actually mean slowing down the milestone (so it arrives at the right time), possibly by adding an additional complication in the form of a mini-scenario to put extra weight on it. In the case of Dragon Heist, the campaign conveniently provides the machinations of Frewn, a business competitor, to disrupt the opening of Trollskull Manor: Maybe you’ve already resolved that in your campaign, but if not you can compress that down into the next couple sessions and have Frewn (and his wererats) go in HARD on screwing up the opening. Thwarting Frewn and celebrating a big, glorious opening day might be a great final session for this player.

Random Tip: In my Dragon Heist run, the players actually put together a menu for Trollskull Manor by having each PC name one food. Then one of the players actually made that menu for dinner one night. You could do something similar, creating a real world feast and celebration to mirror the one in your game.)

PERSONAL GOALS

In terms of personal goals, of course, this depends entirely on the specific PC in question. But it largely boils down to identifying the most important personal goal and wrapping it up.

• Are they seeking revenge on their father’s killer? Oh, look! There’s the six-fingered man now!
• Are they trying to raise money to raise their dead wife from the dead? Insert a mini-scenario that gives them access to a magic item that lets them do that. (If you want to run hard, simultaneously frame things up so that they’re faced with a dilemma: Do they raise their dead wife? Or the orphan killed in the fireball?)
• They wanted to become a teacher at the House of Wonder? Renaer arranges for them to get a position.

You may also be able to combine personal goals and milestones. For example, Renaer surprises them with the position at the House of Wonder during the grand-opening of Trollskull. Or it turns out Lord Gralhund was their father’s killer.

If you’re scratching your head over this or uncertain about what you should do, you can always unleash your GMing superpower by turning to the player and asking, “Hey. Is there anything you really want to get done before leaving the campaign?”

HOOKING THE NEW PLAYER

When it comes to hooking the new player, I discuss this in more detail here.

In most cases, even if you screw this up completely, the metagame will paper over the gaping cracks: Everybody knows this is Peter’s new character, so they will just kind of “naturally” accept him as part of the group. But it is, in fact, this kind of “go with the flow” tendency which, for me, makes it even more important to not have it be that simple; to have the new addition to the group make sense in character.

In terms of the existing player’s send-off, this is mostly significant if sequencing is a problem – i.e., the original player needs to leave before the new player can join, but it would be better or easier to bring the new player in before the milestone that would provide a satisfactory conclusion to the original player.

In these cases, I would almost always tip things in favor of the original player. It’s much more important, in my opinion, to make sure they get a proper send-off; they’ll be plenty of time for the new player to have rewarding experiences in your game.

If possible, though, I’d try to overlap the players. It can, in my experience, make the transition feel much more natural. The only reasons to avoid that would be either interpersonal issues (maybe the original player would be angry playing with the new player for some reason) or if the time dedicated to bringing in the new PC would make it difficult to drive the campaign towards the original player’s big send-off.

Go to Ask the Alexandrian #11

JRL writes:

Are lulls in the game — people pulling up phones, dozing off — acceptable in sessions? Or should it be avoided at all costs?

In diagnosing this, I think you have to distinguish between two groups:

• People who are in the current scene.
• People who are NOT in the current scene.

One of the best things you can have is a group that’s an enthusiastic audience: Even if they’re not the current focus of attention, these players will be completely engaged because they’re entertained and interested in what’s happening within the totality of the campaign. But even in these groups, there’ll be times when people not in the current scene will be tuning out. And that’s probably fine, as long as their activities aren’t distracting or detracting from the current spotlight.

(It’s one thing if they’re checking their e-mail. It’s another if they’re playing videos or pulling other players into chit-chat about a TV series they’ve been watching.)

If the players with characters in the current scene are completely disconnecting from the session, though, that’s a flashing red light that something is wrong.

(Before we go any further, though: Make sure that “check your phone” is actually tuning out. I’m frequently “on my phone” during our Grendleroot campaign, but it’s because I’m looking up my artificer’s spells.)

If spotlight players are tuning out, there are a few things to consider.

Take a break. In a four-hour session you should be taking at least one break. I recommend two or three. Breaks give everyone a chance to recharge and refocus.

Double check. Is the current scene actually interesting? Or are you grinding through empty time that you should be framing past?

Mechanically prompt the group. Calling for a group Perception check or Insight check or whatever your local gaming system’s equivalent is can be a good way to low-key refocus people.

Prompt the tuned-out player. If it’s a social scene, have the NPC turn to their PC and say something like, “What do you think, Tameric?” You can also just specifically ask the player, “What’s Tameric doing?”

If this tune-out is happening during combat, the root cause is probably that it’s taking too long for the combat round to loop back to the player. Solutions for this include:

Off-turn interactions. Some game systems will be designed to give the PCs the ability to take reactions when it’s not their turn. On the one hand this can increase how long it takes a combat round to resolve, but on the other hand it tends to keep players more engaged with what’s happening because they’ll be looking for opportunities to use their off-turn abilities.

Even in the absence of such mechanics, however, you can often proactively engage a player off-turn. Just targeting them with an attack is often enough to get their attention, but something that requires them to actually roll dice (e.g., a saving throw in D&D) or make a decision is even better.

Speeding up combat. Literally just resolving a combat round faster will also help, getting players back to their turns sooner so they have left time to tune out. There are a variety of techniques you can use here, including pre-rolling dice, rolling fistfuls of dice, and putting players on deck. (Putting players on deck is also great because it pre-engages the player with their turn before you actually get all the way back to their turn.)

Most these techniques, as noted, are about making sure that players in the current scene aren’t checking out. But when the party splits up, you don’t necessarily want to leave players unengaged for too long. There are a couple techniques that can help with this, too:

Cut mid-scene. Don’t wait for Group 1 to wrap up everything they’re doing before switching to Group 2. Instead, cut back and forth between the groups in the middle of scenes. This is described in more detail as one of the advanced techniques in The Art of Pacing, and it’s highly effective.

Cast an NPC. Consider the NPCs or monsters in the scene the player isn’t participating in. Then give one of them to the player to play. In combat you can generally just hand them the bad guy’s stat block. In a social scene, you’ll generally want to stick with simpler support roles (that don’t require a lengthy briefing), but more complex roles are possible if you’ve prepped them using something like the universal NPC roleplaying template. (Either way, I would generally suggest avoiding any NPC whose correct portrayal would rely on the player getting access to spoilers.)

IT’S NOT ME, IT’S YOU

With all of that being said, remaining engaged with the session is a two-way street. If you have a player for whom this is a habitual problem — it’s this one specific player who is constantly tuning out — then you need to talk with them about it outside of the game session.

If their tune-out isn’t disrupting the game, then you can just touch base and see how they’re doing. Are they actually disinterested in the campaign? Is there something different you could be doing to make the game better for them? In doing so, you may discover that there’s not actually a problem at all. Some players, particularly those with ADHD, will use structured “distractions” to remain mentally engaged with an activity.

If, however, the player is being disruptive — and having no idea what’s going on because they weren’t paying attention counts as disruptive! — then you need to have a frank discussion with them and figure out a solution. That might even include agreeing that this just isn’t the right game for them (although obviously that would not be the first go-to).

Either way, getting on the same page with your players will make things better for everyone in the long run.

On that note, I will say that you may tempted to implement a table rule like “no using cellphones.” That may work, but in my experience you’re far more likely to be treating the symptom than the disease.

Go to Ask the Alexandrian #9