Upon further reflection, I’ve decided that I don’t understand the practice of giving flowers at a funeral.
On the day itself, they are beautiful and I was deeply touched by the gesture (and deeply in need of seeing how much my mother was supported and loved).
But as the days pass, the flower arrangements become something that you desperately but futilely attempt to care for until they wither and die before your eyes.
It seems like the last thing I really want to be reminded of.
For a beginning GM, the location-based method of adventure prep is the best way to go: Draw a map. Number the rooms. Key the rooms (i.e., describe what’s in each room).
(1) Start small with a Five Room Dungeon.
(2) After a couple of those, go a little larger. And, when you do, start thinking about Xandering Your Dungeon.
(3) Okay, that’s getting awesome. But this map-and-key thing is a little too static: Monsters are just sitting in their rooms and waiting for the PCs to wander by and hit them over the head. So mix it up by prepping an Adversary Roster that’s independent of the map key and then run the monsters in the complex actively (so that goblins from area 6 might run across the compound and reinforce the goblins at area 1). At this point, it may also be useful to broaden your encounter design to give yourself more flexibility in how you use encounter groups.
At this point you’ve probably run about a dozen adventures and you’re starting to get comfortable as a DM. Awesome. Now you can start exploring non-location-based methods of adventure prep. For some basic priming check out: Three Clue Rule, Node-Based Scenario Design, and Don’t Prep Plots. Or, for another classic alternative, check out Hexcrawls.
And if you’re really ready to jump into the deep end: Game Structures.
HOW TO PREP
Throughout all of this, however, don’t over-prep. I think it’s really important to NOT use published adventures as an example of how to prep: Professional adventure writers are trying to communicate their vision to you. If you’re prepping notes for yourself, however, you can trust your creative instincts in the moment.
For example, it’s not necessary to elaborately work out and write down all of the different tactics that a group of orc fighters might use. You can just jot down “8 orcs” or “8 orcs, they’ll try to kick over the pot of boiling stew to burn the PCs” and then trust yourself to be creative in the moment.
Rule of thumb: Details are overrated (with the proviso that essential details and awesome details should always be jotted down).
Similarly, you don’t need to spend a lot of time customizing every stat block. You can take generic stat blocks out of the Bestiary and make them interesting through context and use and creative description. (The one-eyed orc chietain wearing the steel-plated skull of a wyrmling is pretty awesome. But there’s no reason you can’t just use the stat block for an orc warrior from pg. 222 of the Bestiary.)
Another rule of thumb: If you’re spending more time prepping it than your players spend playing it, you’re probably doing something wrong.
Inspired by Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon and Adapted to Fantasy
Deep in the bowels of the earth, the mining of the dwarves broke through into the Cacophony: A vast substrate of strange, fluted rock through which howled an unnatural gale-storm of subterranean wind.
Others might have destroyed such a place. Or sealed it away to save themselves from its terrible roar. Fortunately, the work of dwarves is fraught with care: “With cautious skill, tap by tap — a small chip of rock and no more, perhaps, in a whole anxious day” they discovered that the whole of the Cacophony was made up of a twisted morass of differentiated spires.
And each of these Spires, when separated from the Cacophony of the whole, possessed a unique and ethereal song of haunting beauty.
For generations, therefore, the dwarves have worked: Carefully choosing and extracting each songspire so that its music can be heard. They are rare and beautiful objects, prized by both dwarves and surface dwellers.
Why do we buy gaming consoles? PCs have better specs, broader utility, more versatile controllers, and a larger selection of games.
Lemme take a second to consider the consoles I’ve personally purchased.
I bought a PS3 because because it was the cheapest and best Blu-Ray player on the market. The ease with which the PS3 has been upgraded through firmware to stay current with the latest improvements in the Blu-Ray standard (including 3D) have repeatedly confirmed that this was a smart decision.
I bought an X-Box 360 after the last set of price cuts for the exclusives: Halo, Mass Effect, Gears of War, etc. No regrets. (I only regret the Kinect a little bit, because my wife absolutely adores the voice commands.)
I bought a Wii because the unique controller made possible gaming experiences that were otherwise unavailable. (And it was cheap enough that the novelty had sufficient novelty.)
In the previous generation, a PS2 was a no-brainer for me because of (a) the exclusives and (b) at the time, it was the only way you could sit on your couch and play on your TV. (These days, I’ve got a second PC hooked up to the TV for gaming.)
The other advantage of the current console generation is that it allows me to buy DRM-free copies of games that have DRM-crippled PC releases. I refuse to spend more than $5 on any title that has DRM (since I’m effectively renting the game, I’ll only pay rental prices for it), so there have been a lot of games that I would actually prefer to own for the PC that I’ve purchased for the console instead.
Looking ahead to the next console generation: It looks like DRM may actually end up being more prevalent on the consoles or possibly even mandatory (in which case, I definitely won’t be buying). The advantage of playing-on-the-couch has also vanished (because, as I mentioned, I’ve already got a PC hooked up to my TV). I also suspect the only exclusives we’ll be seeing are from Nintendo and Microsoft because nobody else will be able to justify losing 2/3rds of their potential sales.
I’ve seen people make fun of the Wii-U’s “gimmicky” controller, but ultimately I suspect Nintendo has the right idea: The most effective way to justify a console’s existence is for that console to offer a unique experience. A box and a set of controllers that plugs into your TV no longer qualifies as that.
The other alternative, at least from my perspective, would be for a console to actually offer a comprehensive media center, much like the PS3 justified its purchase cost for me by also serving as my Blu-Ray player. The current generation of consoles kinda pretends that they’re going to do that, but the little walled gardens of limited, hard-to-access content that they currently feature make them look like pale jokes compared to the WD TV Live Hub that I currently have hooked into my TV (which allows me to both trivially stream online video and load any video file from a USB drive).
With that being said, it’s certainly plausible I could end up owning an X-Box 720. I really like Halo.
A fellow over on Reddit asked for feedback on a campaign in which an ancient curse prevented anyone from gaining XP and advancing past 1st level — a “world without heroes”. My random thoughts:
First, experience points are an abstract mechanic that represents the ability for people to learn and grow as individuals. If the world is literally “no XP is ever gained by anyone, ever” then, in terms of the game world, that means a world of horrible, almost automaton-like stasis.
Of course, if people can never learn anything more than the knowledge they’re born with, the human race is basically reduced back to base animals. So let’s make an exception for kids: If you’re a kid, you can still learn and be educated. But once you hit 16 or 18 (or whatever arbitrary age you want to set), the curse takes effect and the light in your eyes is snuffed out.
This opens the door a bit for child prodigies: The exceptional few who can achieve more than 1st level before they turn 18 and the curse hits them. Most of ’em still won’t get far, but you might get the occasional 3rd level character running around just to ease things up in your world-building a bit. (This could also give you a mechanism for your PCs: They’re actually just exceptional 16 year olds. But the clock is ticking for them: At 18, the light goes out. If they’re going to find a way to reverse the Curse, they’re going to have to do it before they join the grey mass of inertia-driven grown-ups around them.
SURVIVING IN A WORLD OF MONSTERS
The typical PC races are going to have a real tough time of it if the world is filled with CR 2-20 encounters and they’re all stuck at CR 1. Although the other races are also limited by the Curse, even something as simple as an ogre has a huge advantage in terms of natural selection in this world.
The obvious solution is that the PC races need to either transform themselves into something more powerful or they need to make powerful allies. A few possibilities off the top of my head:
(1) Most of the successful city-states have made pacts with demons. Basically, an entire city will auction off its souls to a demonic patron and that patron will, in exchange, protect them. A few “soul-free” might cling to the edges of civilization, but the lands of the civilized races have become dark and perverted places — a patchwork of demonic alliances waging fruitless and endless proxy wars.
(2) Vampires vs. Werewolves. Cliche? Sure. But undead and lycanthropic plagues are one of the few ways for humans to empower themselves in this milieu. Expect to see cities where vampires rule openly as an elite caste and freedom fighters attempting to overthrow the vampires willingly infect themselves with lycanthropy in order to have the strength to rebel.
(3) Or, vice versa, the nobles are all lycanthropes who, once per month, invoke their ancient rights of sanguis nocte and hunt through the city or countryside to feast upon their subjects.
(4) Or perhaps it’s a world in which human cities are built around plateaus of step-pyramids in which almost constant human sacrifices are carried out as part of the ritual magic required to keep the vast undead armies protecting the city under control.
(5) Dwarves survive because they have hidden themselves away behind vast layers of stone. Their cities are laced with countless traps — an endless layering of defenses which only fuels the well-earned dwarven paranoia. (Because they know, deep in their hearts, that some day a darkness will creep into their cities and they will be powerless to stop it. And the deeper they delve away from the terrors of the sunlit world, the closer to that darkness they come.) The rigidity of their caste structures coupled with the effects of the Curse over long centuries have reduced the majority of the dwarven population to an autonomous hivemind. (Ever read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson? Think about he describes the form human civilization took before we gained individual consciousness.)
(6) Things are not pretty for the elves. The woods they once ruled are filled with powerful dangers they are no long capable of mastering and the ancient demesnes that once swore fealty to them are now more powerful than they. They are a broken and scattered people with no homeland to call their own. It is said, however, that in the earliest days of the Curse some of the elves crafted refuges upon the Ethereal Plane before their craft was utterly lost to them. Its hard to say what may have happened to those trapped within, having no way to return to the Material Plane when the arts of magic required for the passage were lost to them.
