Discussions about using published material in your RPG campaign – settings, scenarios, etc. – tend to break down into two camps: Those who eschew it as heresy and those who argue that it’s a necessary time-saving device for many GMs. Where people fall on this spectrum will often vary depending on the type of material being discussed: Many of those who declare all GMs who use published scenarios as unconscionable hacks would nevertheless be completely baffled by someone suggesting that their use of published Monster Manuals betrays their creative weakness and incompetence.

(As you can tell, these are often “fun” discussions.)

I tend to take a third position in this debate: When used properly, high quality material isn’t just a time-saving device or a compromise. It will improve your game and give a result better than what could have been achieved without the third-party material. (Which is not to say that every campaign can or should include published material, because there are other creative agendas to consider.)

I draw an analogy to theater: Yes, it is possible for a theater company to perform nothing but material developed by the people performing it. But the reason theater companies choose to mount productions of Hamlet is that (a) the creative input of the playwright spurs creativity from the other participants that wouldn’t exist without that input; (b) the act of creative interpretation is unique, rewarding, and distinct from blank slate creation; and (c) the specific interpretation of a particular production creates a communal dialogue and shared experience with other productions, which can enhance both the short-term and long-term rewards of the production.

Similarly, when one runs the Tomb of Horrors it’s not just that the module can create experiences the group would not have created on its own: The group can also benefit from the experiences others have had with the module, and the shared experience (for example, being able to swap tales about what happened in your version of the Tomb) can create long-term enjoyment that wouldn’t exist with bespoke material.

More than merely the shared experience, though, I feel that using pre-existing material can have a positive impact on your campaign that extends far beyond the immediate utility of the material itself. One of the primary ways this is true is through the use of reincorporation when adapting the material to your campaign.

CREATING ELEMENTS

Before delving into that, let’s take a moment to discuss what reincorporation is. For any creative element in roleplaying there are three moments of instantiation:

• Creation
• Repetition
• Reincorporation

Creation is the moment at which the element is first conceived. Repetition is when that element is used again. Reincorporation is when the repetition of an element reveals it to have connections to other pre-existing elements.

For example, you create a bounty hunter named Nafassk. Repetition happens when Nafassk shows up again hunting another bounty. Reincorporation happens when you reveal that Nafassk is working for the PCs’ old patron, Prelate Cadal; it happens again when it turns out Nafassk frequents the same tavern the PCs do; it happens again when Nafassk is hired to kill the PCs; and so forth.

(The distinction between “repetition” and “reincorporation” can be a little hard to grok, but notice that repetition of Nafassk only serves to add additional details about Nafassk. When Nafassk is reincorporated into the narrative, on the other hand, it’s not only our understanding of Nafassk which is deepened; we also learn more about Prelate Cadal, the social scene of the tavern is enriched, and so forth.)

Due to the unusual nature of roleplaying games, it should be also noted that the creation-repetition/reincorporation sequence may not match the sequence of how that material is encountered during actual play. One example of this is foreshadowing, in which the GM creates an element for inclusion at Point X in the campaign, and then includes repetitions and/or reincorporations of the material before the players reach Point X as a herald of what’s to come.

Creative personalities often worship in the Cult of the New, and GMs are no exception. It can feel far more exciting to create something shiny and new rather than reincorporating existing material. But reincorporation builds meaning; it builds relationships; it builds significance. Sometimes the joke is funnier when you bring it back than it was the first time.

(This is usually less true of simple repetition, which is why just quoting Monty Python isn’t as funny as when Monty Python throws a wooden rabbit at you.)

Superhero comics understand the balancing act between novelty and reincorporation: It would get boring if Batman faced off against the Joker in every single issue. But the Joker also becomes a richer and more interesting character as a result of his history with Batman.

ADAPTATION THROUGH REINCORPORATION

How does this relate to the use of published material?

For the moment, I’m going to look at this through the lens of published scenarios, although the same advice can apply to the use of other published material. Generally speaking, published scenarios are generic: Their content is obviously self-contained. Every creative element that the published scenario introduces is, by necessity, new to your campaign.

(In many of my published works, including the core style guides for Infinity scenarios, I make a point of including suggestions on how the material in the scenario can be seeded into your campaign before the scenario started – what I call “Groundwork” – and also how elements of the scenario can be carried forward into future scenarios of your campaign. But that’s more the exception than the rule, and it’s still limited to being a one-way transaction.)

What I’m suggesting is that one of the first things you should do when adapting published material to your campaign is to look for ways to reincorporate existing elements of your campaign instead of simply using the new elements introduced by the published material. Does the new scenario feature a vampire villain? Can you use that vampire lord the PCs encountered a couple months ago? Or maybe this new vampire was sired by the vampire lord? Or could you adapt the scenario to feature the lich who’s the primary recurring antagonist instead?

This approach can seem counterintuitive for those who think of published material as primarily being a timesaver, since you’re often ripping out perfectly good material simply to create more work for yourself in tweaking existing elements of the campaign world.

The obvious reason for doing this is that, by reincorporating elements into the scenario, you enrich the scenario: You make it more personal for the PCs. You create deeper meaning. You give the events greater significance.

What may be less obvious is that this works both ways: The pre-existing context of your campaign flows into the published material, but the context of the published material also flows out into your pre-existing material, resulting in long-term value that can last long after the scenario has been completed.

For example, I made the decision early on when developing the Western Lands setting I’ve used for most of my D&D campaigns since 2000 that there would only be one pantheon of gods. And, moreover, that pantheon would consist of exactly nine gods and I knew who all of them were.

This creates a significant limitation for me when adapting pre-existing scenarios which feature religious edifices and institutions. Which, this being D&D, is practically all of them. Often, like Roman cult-looters, I can simply equate the scenario writer’s god with one my own: God of the harvest to my goddess of the harvest, warrior god to my warrior god, and so forth. But each time I do this, my gods and goddesses tend to accrue additional details. It was thus that Vehthyl, the God of Magic, also became the Clockmaker. And Crissa, the Mother, gained the aspect of the Defender, in which form she is often depicted with the Sword of Justice and the Shield of Truth. (And this, in turn, also began to give new light to her relationship with her son, Itor, the God of War.)

When I adapted Rappan Athuk and The Tomb of Abysthor from Necromancer Games to form the heart of another campaign in the setting, I realized it would be useful to have smaller religious cults. This led to the creation of the Saint Cults, which venerated their chosen god through the Saints who had become living conduits of their god’s will. This concept would grow to become so central to the campaign setting that in my Ptolus campaign one of the characters actually became a living saint.

As you can see, this actually works great with cultural aspects of your campaign world. Fictional cultures are often very flat and one-dimensional. Reincorporation through adaptation tends to force the kinds of messy compromises and weird regional variations that you see in real world cultures. And it doesn’t have to be limited to the big, mythological elements: Instead of moving to the new town described in the next adventure module you’re using, add the NPCs and locations in the new material to the PCs’ existing community (and figure out their relationships to the existing community).

The bridges that you can cross with these techniques can be quite large. For example, I once ran a (sadly abortive) campaign mixing the Freeport Trilogy from Green Ronin games with Greg Stolze’s City of Lies for Legend of the Five Rings. Blending the byzantine Eastern politics and Opium Wars of City of Lies added incredible depeth to the Mythos-infused pirate town of Freeport.

And it’s really those surprises – those unexpected juxtapositions and compromises out of which immense creativity erupts – that makes this technique so incredibly rewarding.

Over the years, I’ve run into a number of GMs who are nervous about running a game set in an established setting. Sometimes that’s an established media property (like Tolkien’s Middle Earth or Lucas’ Star Wars), in other cases it’s a published RPG setting. This becomes even more true, of course, when the lore of the setting is particularly dense or particularly expansive. Common examples include Tekumel, Transhuman Space, or even the Forgotten Realms. The perception is that, in order to run such settings, the GM must be possessed of an encyclopedic mastery of their minutia. A similar problem seems to often afflict historical settings.

“I’ve gotta get this right!” is a mental trap that I can understand, but as a GM you need to be comfortable letting it go because it will consistently limit your gaming. Want to run a game set in contemporary Toronto? Well, even if you’ve lived there your entire life, you’re probably going to end up contradicting reality at some point while running it. Ditto if you’re running a World War II scenario or a Victorian London scenario or a Samurai Japan scenario. Running only settings which you’ve created for yourself completely out of whole cloth is a really strict straitjacket that’s going to rob you of a lot of great gaming experiences.

On the flip-side, that doesn’t mean you should get flippant with continuity either. Nobody playing a Star Wars game wants to see the Death Star show up as a giant cube. What you’re looking for is the “grok threshold”: The point where you fundamentally understand how the setting ticks so that you can make up new details about the setting in a way that’s consistent with the setting as a whole. Once you’ve hit that grok threshold, however, you should then feel free to own the setting (which can also mean making significant changes to the established canon).

Often the quickest way to hit that grok threshold is to actually start using the setting. A few tips that I’ve found useful:

(1) If you want to look up a detail, give yourself 30 seconds to find it. If you haven’t found it after 30 seconds, make it up. If it turns out that you’ve contradicted something, sort it out after the session (by either revising the setting or explaining the necessary retcon to your players).

(2) If you’ve got a player at the table with expertise, don’t be afraid to leverage that expertise. (“Hey, Bob, what’s the name of the Archduke of the Red Isles?”) On the other hand, if you’re feeling pressured by the expert to “always get it right”, it can be useful to establish upfront that you’ve customized the setting and that people can expect changes. Don’t be afraid of accepting corrections if it’s not a big deal; but if it would mean that you have to scrap all of the prep for your current session just retcon the setting to match your prep and move forward from there.

(3) Dip your toes into the setting starting with areas which aren’t heavily described. Eclipse Phase, for example, is an incredibly dense and complicated setting, but there are thousands of habitats and settlements which have no description whatsoever. Even official locations within the setting will often have only minimal descriptions. For example, this is the description of the Carpo habitat:

Carpo is one of the few moons of Jupiter that is in its own group. This irregular moonlet is only about 3 kilometers in diameter, yet hosts a population of around 17,000 transhumans; over 98% of that number are infomorphs and the remainder synthmorphs. The Carpo infomorphs reside in a simulspace designed and managed by an infomorph calling himself Da5id. The simulspace itself is an alternate historical America, in which transhuman ethics and morality are being applied to 1800s sensibilities. Admission is very strict and seemingly completely arbitrary.

It’s easy to completely master those details and then build on top of them.

(4) With particularly expansive settings, it can also be effective to limit the “official canon” for your games. For example, when I run Star Wars campaigns I have virtually always limited my canon to the six movies created by George Lucas (unless I’m specifically running a game to explore some other chunk of official lore). I’ll freely reach out and grab other interesting bits of lore (planets, characters, etc.) from novels, comics, and animated series (or even the Holiday Special if I’m feeling perverse) — they become resources I can tap without being restrictions which I feel bound by.

WHY BOTHER?

The primary reasons for using a pre-made campaign setting are the extant expectations/knowledge of the players, the sense of shared community, the reduction in prep time, and the injection of someone else’s creative vision with your own.

Of these, I consider the last to be the most valuable: Just as actors perform the role of Hamlet because they want to take Shakespeare’s creative vision and expand it with their own, so your goal in using a pre-made campaign setting should be to take the creative vision and expand it with your own. The actor playing Hamlet will learn things and create things they would never have created if they had simply improvised their own dialogue; similarly you will learn things and create things you would never have created if you had simply created the setting yourself.

(Which is not to disparage the art of creating your own campaign setting or improv acting, obviously.)

My point here is that the degree to which you accept the creative vision and the degree to which you transform the creative vision will vary in both part and scale. You want to take the setting of Eclipse Phase, for example, and consciously make some huge changes to the setting like moving the Jovian Republic to Mercury or having the Factors waging a guerilla war against humanity on Mars? Go for it. After you ran the last session you discovered that you were referring to Carpo’s AI as Mel1ssa instead of Da5id? It’s similarly fine if you simply embrace that change and then move forward to see what happens next.

A couple rules of thumb I use for crafting evocative descriptions as a GM:

THREE OF FIVE: Think about your five senses. Try to include three of them in each description. Sight is a gimme and a Taste will rarely apply, so that means picking a couple out of Hearing, Smell, and Touch. Remember that you don’t actually have to touch something in order to intuit what it might feel like if you did. Touch can also include things like wind and temperature.

TWO COOL DETAILS: Try to include two irrelevant-but-cool details. These are details that aren’t necessary for the encounter/room to function, but are still cool. It’s the broken cuckoo clock in the corner; the slightly noxious odor with no identifiable source; the graffiti scrawled on the wall; the bio-luminescent fungus; etc.

THREE-BY-THREE: Delta’s 1-2-(3)-Infinity talks about psychological research demonstrating that repeating something three times takes up the same space in our brains as repeating something infinitely. Thus, once you’ve hit the third item in a sequence, any additional items in that sequence are redundant.

Extrapolating from this, for minor scenes you can describe three things each with a single detail. At that point, you’ve filled up the “infinity queue” in your players’ brains and their imaginations, predicting the pattern, will impulsively fill in the finer details of the scene you’ve evoked. For “epic” descriptions, use the full three-by-three: Describe three different elements with three details each.

KEEP IT PITHY: On a similar note, lengthy descriptions are not how you achieve immersion. What you want are a handful of evocative images that the players can perform an act of closure upon to realize the scene in their own minds. This not only prevents them from “tuning out” a long description, the act of closure itself will draw them into and immerse them in the game world — they become, as Scott McCloud described under different circumstances in Understanding Comics, silent partners in the creation of the world, and thus become both invested in it and captured by it.

DESCRIPTION DOESN’T END: The legacy of boxed text indoctrinates a lot of GMs with the idea that you describe the environment up front and then, from that point forward, the players are just taking actions within the pre-established environment. But that’s an artificial dynamic. Instead, details of the setting can continue flowing through the description of that action: The crunch of broken glass beneath their feet as they move across the room. The coppery smell of blood as they draw near the corpse. The sudden chill from the wind whipping in through the shattered window.

Like most rules of thumb, of course, none of these should be treated like straitjackets.

This is an updated and expanded version of a tip that originally appeared in 2011.

I can’t do a murder mystery because the PCs will just cast speak with dead.

I’ve seen this sentiment a lot, but it’s never really made any sense to me: The act of investigating a mystery is one by which you reveal that which is unknown. When we talk about PCs casting a speak with dead spell, we’re describing a situation in which the players reveal that which is unknown (i.e., they investigate the mystery), but then, oddly, we’re supposed to conclude that they can’t investigate the mystery because they investigate the mystery.

I think part of the problem here lies in an erroneous instinct that I talked about as part of the Three Clue Rule:

There is a natural impulse when designing a mystery, I think, to hold back information. This is logical inclination: After all, a mystery is essentially defined by a lack of information. And there’s a difference between having lots of clues and having the murderer write his home address in blood on the wall.

But, in reality, while a mystery is seemingly defined by a lack of knowledge, the actual action of a mystery is not the withholding of knowledge but rather the discovery of knowledge.

Let me put it another way: Strip the magic out of this scenario. Imagine that you’ve designed a mystery scenario in which there was a witness to the crime. The PCs turn to this witness and say, “Who killed him?” and the witness says, “It was Bob.” And it turns out Bob is just standing there, so they arrest him. End of mystery.

You wouldn’t conclude that you can’t do mystery scenarios because people can talk to each other right?

Speak with dead should be no more alarming than an FBI team taking fingerprints or a CSI team enhancing video and running facial analysis.

DESIGN TO THE SPELL

You may also see people suggesting that you “nerf” the spell to one degree or another. (Corpses that refuse to answer questions, for example.) Nothing is more frustrating to a player than having their smart choices blocked because the GM has some preconceived notion of how they’re supposed to be investigating the crime.

But what you can do is design your mysteries to the reality of the spell. Generally speaking, after all, people in the game world know that the spell exists, right? So they aren’t going to plan their murders in ways that will expose them. (Any more than people in a magic-free setting will commit their murders while standing directly in front of surveillance of cameras.) They will find ways to conceal their identity; they may even find ways to try to use the spell to frame other people. (For example, imagine a murder scenario where the victim thinks one of the PCs did it because the perpetrator used a polymorph spell.)

OTHER DIVINATIONS

The same advice generally applies to other divination spells, too. The only divination effects which are truly problematic are those which allow you to contact omniscient beings and receive crystal clear information from them. Fortunately, these spells basically don’t exist in D&D (and most other games). The closest you can get are commune and contact other plane, but both are explicitly limited to the knowledge of the entity you’re contacting. (1st Edition AD&D actually had a lovely table for determining “Likelihood of Knowledge” and “Veracity”.)

FURTHER READING
Zone of Truth Mysteries
Three Clue Rule

Something I like to occasionally do during a session is to speak in tongues. It can be a nice touch of flavor to have one of the orcs the party is talking to turn to their comrade and whisper something in unintelligible orcish. Or to have an elf lord curse at them with silken invectives. Or have the strange, angelic being woken from an elder age quiz them in the stilted tones of a forgotten common tongue.

When I do this, of course, it’s not actually important that what I’m saying actually means anything. (If you actually know a fantasy tongue like Tolkien’s Quenya, that’s fantastic, but not required for this technique to be effective. And sprinkling in established words from a fantasy language as a sort of slang is a different thing, albeit also cool.) What is important is that the content flows, varies, and has a consistent tone. In other words, it needs to sound like someone actually speaking.

However, this can be difficult to smoothly achieve. To assist with this effect, I’ve created a tool I refer to as a Fantasy Lorem Ipsum: For each fantasy language, I have two pages of pre-generated text (which can be printed on both sides of a single sheet of paper). When I want to “speak” in that language, I can simply choose a location on the sheet and begin performing from it. You can also use these sheets to quickly generate handouts by copying and pasting a chunk of text. (You can then provide the “translation” separately if one of the PCs knows the language.)

Ancient Common
Dwarvish
Elvish
Halfling
Orc