A common form of mapping for RPG cities is the block map. For example, here’s the city of Kintargo from the Hell’s Rebels adventure path:

A common mistake when looking at such a map is to interpret each individual outline as being a single building. For example, when I posted a behind-the-scenes peek at how I developed the map for the city of Anyoc years ago, a number of people told me I’d screwed up by leaving too much space between the buildings. Except the map didn’t actually depict any individual buildings: Each outline was a separate block, made up of several different buildings.

When people look at a block map and interpret it as depicting individual buildings, how far off is their vision of the city?

Well, we can actually see this exemplified in a few cases where artists have (in my opinion) misinterpreted block maps. Blades in the Dark, for example, has a block map for the city of Duskwall. Below you can see a sample of that block map (on the left) next to a block map of a section of Paris (on the right).

If it was not self-evident, the interpretation of the Duskwall map as a block map is supported by this description of the city from the rulebook:

The city is densely packed inside the ring of immense lightning towers that protect it from the murderous ghosts of the blighted deathlands beyond. Every square foot is covered in human construction of some kind — piled one atop another with looming towers, sprawling manors, and stacked row houses; dissected by canals and narrow twisting alleys; connected by a spiderweb of roads, bridges, and elevated walkways.

You can see that if you interpret Duskwall’s map as detailing individual buildings, the layout of the city actually becomes far more organized and well-regulated than seems intended by the text. This is, in fact, a common problem when GMs misinterpret block maps: Their vision of the city, and the resulting descriptions are heavily simplified.

For example, when Ryan Dunleavy decided to develop a large version of the Duskwall map, he interpreted each block on the map as being an individual building (or, occasionally, two). Compare the resulting illustration of a single block in Duskwall (on the left) to what a single block in Paris (on the right) actually looks like:

(Please don’t interpret this as some sort of massive indictment of the artist here. Ryan Dunleavy’s cartography is gorgeous, and I recommend backing his Patreon for more of it.)

You can see another example of this with Green Ronin’s Freeport. When first revealed to the world in 2000’s Death in Freeport module, the city was depicted using a rough block map:

In 2002, for the original City of Freeport, this was redone with most of the blocks being represented as individual buildings:

The map was redone again for The Pirate’s Guide to Freeport, this time reinterpreting the original outlines as a block map:

I pull out this example primarily to point out that sometimes a block map outline IS, in fact, a single building. Because some buildings are really big. Or, in other cases, they might represent walled estates, as shown here with the estates along the western edge of the map.

And here’s a real world example of this from Paris with both the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais:

(click for larger size)

The north-south cross section of the Grand Palais is fairly comparable to the Parisian block shown above.

CONCLUSION

My point with all this basically boils down to don’t mistake the map for the territory. One of the great advantages of the block map approach to city mapping is that it leaves so much to the imagination, allowing both you and your players to lay in immense amounts of fractal complexity onto a simple geometric shape.

(Which is not to say that block maps are the be-all or end-all of utility at the gaming table. You can take my copy of Ed Bourelle’s Ptolus map when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.)

And when you miss that opportunity — when your mental image of the block map reduces each geometric shape to a single building — you’re robbing the city of its grandeur, its complexity, and its flexibility.

Take a moment to go back and look at the map of Kintargo, for example. Imagine what that city would look like if each block were, in fact, a single building. What you’ll probably end up with is a modest city still possessed of some good degree of size. But what you should actually end up with in your mind’s eye is this:

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This isn’t the first time I’ve talked about stealth here at the Alexandrian. Much of what I’ve written about is how to adjudicate stealth in a way which makes it a viable strategy for the PCs to pursue: Far too many GMs resolve stealth by having every PC in the group make a Stealth check opposed by the Notice check of every single NPC who could possibly see them. (In some systems it’s even worse, with GMs requiring every PC to make multiple checks opposed by every single NPC that could possibly see them.)

One way of dealing with this is to just have the PCs’ skill at stealth completely outclass the NPCs around them. Even in systems where the PCs are allowed to achieve supreme levels of power, however, this is usually doesn’t happen: The game world too often levels up with them, and because it seems that game designers are generally terribly paranoid about their bad guys NOT noticing the PCs, virtually every single NPC has their Notice checks cranked up through the roof. Even if this was generally true, however, I wouldn’t be entirely satisfied with the results. My goal isn’t to make Stealth automatically successful; it’s to make it viable. I don’t want to take the consequences of failing a Stealth check off the table (they can be interesting); I just don’t want that to be the de facto outcome every time Stealth is attempted (because, in short order, nobody will attempt Stealth any more).

So I generally suggest two broad paradigms when resolving Stealth attempts.

First, reduce the number of required rolls. When you call for a separate check against every single NPC, you’re usually rolling to failure. Avoid that by using let it ride techniques, resolving entire Stealth approaches in a single mechanical resolution. (For an example of how effective this can be in practice, check out Let it Ride on the Death Star.)

Second, reduce the number of people rolling. You’ll note that this also reduces the number of rolls required. If you have seven PCs roll to resolve a Stealth attempt whereas normally only one PC needs to roll a skill in order to accomplish an objective (like opening a locked door, for example), you’ve created a situation very analogous to rolling to failure and with the same unappealing probability curve; you’re just doing it all at once.

Generally speaking, you want to get the Stealth resolution boiled down to a single mechanical check (just like 99% of all other resolution checks you make in the game). One way to do that is to specify that the character with the lowest Stealth skill in the group makes the check. This makes sense because they’re the one pulling the rest of the group down, right? Personally, though, I’m not a fan of this approach. It penalizes the Stealth specialist in a way that other specialists are NOT punished, robbing the Stealth specialist of their well-deserved spotlight. I also think it’s more reasonable to assume that a character skilled in stealth can help their companions sneak into situations that they wouldn’t normally be able to sneak into.

Instead, I like to institute some form of piggybacking. This often requires a little bit of mechanical finagling in the system of your choice, but it’s worth the effort because once you have the mechanical structure you’ll find it coming in useful time and time again. For more discussion on this, check out Group Checks.

A PARADIGM FOR STEALTH

When designing the Infinity Roleplaying Game, I designed a new game structure for resolving stealth. I think it provides a clear paradigm for GMs to use in making rulings about stealth, and I also think you’ll find it easy to adapt to most any game system.

STEALTH STATES: Characters exist in one of three stealth states.

• Revealed characters are visible to their enemies and their precise location is known.
• Detected characters cannot currently be seen by their enemies, but their presence and approximate location are known. (“I heard something in the bushes over there.” or “The shot came from that apartment building!”)
• Hidden characters cannot currently be seen, heard, or otherwise perceived by the enemies. Although an enemy may be aware of their presence, their actual location is not known. (“Someone broke a lock on Entrance 3A. Sweep the building.”)

The states of “detected” and “hidden” are referred to as “stealthy states”.

STEALTH STATE TESTS: When a character in a stealthy state takes an action, they may need to make a stealth state check. Opponents can also take action to force characters in a stealthy state make a stealth state test. (“I’m going to check the warehouse again.”) The exact mechanic you use to resolve a stealth state check will obviously depend on what game you’re using.

STEALTHY ACTIONS: Becoming hidden is an action which requires a stealth state test. Once a character is in a stealthy state, they remain in that state until either they or an opponent takes an action which threatens that state. In general, these actions are not specifically classified. This is not a laundry list; it’s a paradigm that GMs can use to make their rulings.

• A silent action does not change the stealth state of the character performing it.
• A sneaky action requires a stealth state test, which is performed as part of the same action. If the test fails, the character’s stealth state is reduced by one step.
• A noisy action allows opponents to automatically make some form of Observation test (with a difficulty determined by exactly how noisy the action is) in order to detect the character, reducing their stealth state by one step.

Design Note: You’ll probably also want some mechanism by which the reaction to a noisy action can be escalated to a two step reduction: Margin of success or possibly an additional action of some type. In Infinity the Observation test was made at difficulty 0 (making it essentially automatic unless the environment, special equipment, or special training applied a difficulty modifier to the Observation test), and success allowed for an immediate Reaction to force an opposed stealth state test to escalate to a two step loss (immediately revealing a previously Hidden character).

You may also want some mechanism by which stealthy characters can reduce the severity of a stealthy action by one or two steps. In Infinity, for example, you can spend 2 Momentum to reduce a noisy action to a sneaky action or a sneaky action to a silent action. But there are any number of options beyond bennie spends.

COMMON SENSE PREVAILS: Many actions that directly affect a target (like shooting them) will automatically result in a stealthy character becoming detected by the target (even if they perform the attack in perfect silence from a state of impenetrable invisibility). Characters can also choose to simply stop being stealthy, either deliberately or as an obvious consequence to their actions. (“I’m going to walk out into the well-lit parking lot with my hands on my head and shout out my surrender.”)

MANY FORMS OF STEALTH: The Infinity Roleplaying Game takes this paradigm one step further by applying the same core structure to stealthy actions in other contexts (such as the hacking sequences of Infowar scenes and the social confrontations of Psywar scenes). This is part of a wider design methodology I used in Infinity to unify mechanical paradigms and structures in order to keep the system easy to learn and use even though it needed to cover the vast panoply of structures found in a full-blown space opera. (This, however, is a topic for another time.)

STEALTH AND ENHANCED PERCEPTIONS

Something that I think can be a struggle for GMs in general are characters who possess some form of enhanced perception: You’re already trying to keep a consistent picture of the campaign world in your head using the five senses you’re familiar with, and now you suddenly need to also try to imagine that setting through totally alien eyes. There’s a wider discussion to be had about enhanced perceptions in RPGs, but they also clearly have an impact on the rulings you make about stealth specifically.

For example, Eclipse Phase is a game where a truly dizzying array of enhanced perceptions are virtually commonplace. They include (just counting perception of the physical world):

• IR
• UV
• T-Ray
• Radar
• Enhanced Smell
• Electrical Sensitivity
• Magnetic Sensitivity
• Radiation Sense
• Zoom Vision

And this doesn’t even include the more esoteric examples, like the completely bizarre array of senses available to the suryas (space whales).

Often the best way to get a grip on this sort of thing is to take your cue from the resolution: Note that a character has, for example, infrared vision. If they successfully spot someone trying to sneak past them, think about how their infrared vision could have helped them do that and frame your description of what happens accordingly. Conversely, if they fail to spot someone trying to sneak past them, think about how that person could have thwarted their infrared vision (finding a hot background to hide against, for example) and describe accordingly. In doing so you’ll not only be teaching yourself to think about the world in terms of these enhanced perceptions, you’ll also be slowly introducing these concepts to the players. As both you and the players gain expertise over time, these enhanced senses will become integrated into your vision of the game world and you’ll likely begin preemptively taking them into account.

For example, your players might start saying before the check that they’re going to choose an approach that will let them mask their heat signature. When that happens, remember that player expertise can trump character expertise and rule accordingly.

Something else to keep in mind, however, is that enhanced perceptions may not be strictly beneficial; they can also have drawbacks. (Think of the guy in night vision goggles who suddenly gets blinded when the lights get flipped on.) In an e-mail to me, Robert Rendell pointed out the interesting consequences of this:

For creatures who can see fine in the dark (such as most monsters who inhabit unlit areas of dungeons), a nearby light source might not be anywhere near as obvious. If you have darkvision and can already see your surroundings perfectly well, someone bringing a light source near you won’t make much of a difference [i.e., it won’t allow them to see anything they couldn’t already see; it would be like carrying a candle into an already lit room… you might notice, but you might not]. You might start noticing colours, but that’s nowhere near as stark as going from blind to not blind.

Obviously, since darkvision has a fixed range, someone with a light source beyond that range would still tend to stand out. Intelligent creatures with darkvision might take advantage of that, attempting to have guard stations which have more than 60′ of clear sight along straight approaches to their lairs so approaching light sources are more obvious. They could also take other precautions: Having bright colours near their guard stations which will leap out when light is brought near, or even writing “Intruders!” in coloured paint on the wall to alert them when light is nearby.

This is obviously dependent on exactly how you choose to metaphysically interpret “darkvision” (and that might vary from one type of darkvision to another). But it’s a really cool idea, and highlights a way in which you can make this panoply of perceptions in fantastical worlds really come alive, creating a truly unique world with experiences you could never have in the here and now.

Another way to think about this within our wider paradigm for stealth is that actions might be classified differently depending on the senses which are perceiving them: For example, walking through a dark dungeon with a candle in your hand might qualify as a noisy action if someone with normal vision is trying to spot you. But the light might be totally irrelevant to a creature who can perceive the world only through radar, effectively rendering the candle-carrying a silent action vs. those creatures. Whether used in various gradations or as hard binaries, this can give some concrete mechanical oomph to the unique properties of these different types of perception.

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.