Printing The Lantern

Sterling has sent me the image shown. It's marvelous to see the print of the magazine, which I've not done, especially in "the wild" like this. Thrills me to no end.

He's printed up the issue in black and white, suspecting that as is, the magazine would be too dark to print as is.  I would suggest that should you choose to do so, for black-and-white, lower the brightness a touch (-5%), increase the contrast slightly (+5-10%), sharpen the text edges and desaturate instead of relying on auto-greyscale.

For colour printing, leave the brightness alone, unless your printer is known for printing dark. In that case, raise your brightness about 5%. Also for colour, reducing the contrast increase to just 3-5%, and reduce the highlights slightly (3-5%).  Turn off any vivid or enhancement modes, as those will oversaturate and distort the layout.

Try a test page first (Sterling says the cinnamon ad is a little dark behind the black text when printed), so you can judge before printing all 24 pages.  If you use a printer, be sure you discuss these things with them, so they can account for the issues.  The image is made on a computer, for computers, and I admit I tend to have my computer turned up a little bright.

The September 1635 Edition of The Lantern Advanced Copy Available

The second issue of The Lantern, for September, is available, but only as a preview.  The only way this can be read at this time requires joining the $10 tier of my patreon.  They will be the first to see it, and will no doubt want to talk about it.

A more accessible version for $7 will be available on Patreon and on Lulu on the 21st of August, by which time I will be well into the October issue. I'm very excited about September's offer because it allows me to demonstrate the greater scope of the project. My goal from the beginning was not to just produce the same concept with the same headings month after month, or use the same voices, but to create a collection of broadsheet "contributors" that will become occasional entities... while at the same time building the setting out, not just within the scope of Devonshire, but in fact the whole world.

I'm very excited about what I have planned for October, though I won't say a word about that. Meanwhile, please enjoy the easter eggs scattered through the second issue, as it lends greater depth and context to the first.
 

Bakeries to D&D

Let's look at a business model to get into the right headspace. I want to run a bakery. There's too much work for me to do on my own, and much of the work must be done between 1 AM and 9 the next morning, while much of the interactive trade with my suppliers must be done between 9 and 5. That creates a 16 hour continuous work window, which I cannot be awake for beginning to end, especially because the bakery is likely to be open another three hours, until 8 pm. Plus, to manage my suppliers, and other business issues like advertising and quality assurance, not to mention legalistic problems having to do with a very hot oven operating in a locale that must be easily accessible, most of the time I just cannot even oversee the day to day sales of product.

Therefore, I need at least three persons that I want to hire: a baker, and probably a helper for the baker, but let's call this one person for now. A day person, someone who can arrive at noon and leave at 8, because this person must be able to do the cashout, and therefore must be responsible, and a person who can cover the last of the baker's shift and the day person's... and here is the real big issue with a bakery: the busiest part of the day is between 7 AM and 11 AM... where the third person, the one not doing the cashout and not cooking the product, IS hard pressed. And my business really relies on this person, because this person's attitude to that busy period is going to make or break me.

So, three critical persons, all of whom are doing work that could easily end my business, and I can't practically oversee them, due to my other responsibilities as a business owner. This is why running a bakery is next to impossible... because if you hire a fourth or fifth person to make SURE the business runs well, the cost of labour can easily break me.

It is for reasons like this that authority of any kind isn't about comfort or vague self-expression.  Try to go into business as a bakery owner to "find yourself" and you will very quickly find that you're not a bakery owner.  There's no room to romanticise your work or your staff, or hedge your expectations... you have to calculate precisely, daily, what needs to happen and enforce structures that ensure it.

This principle, as it happens, does not apply to DMing a game.  But funnily enough, DMing a game DOES apply to this principle.

To continue with the model discussed.  As a bakery owner, and really any sort of authority we may ever embrace, the more we know about the business we're in, the better. A bakery is always strengthened if the owner is a baker, and knows how to bake if the baker doesn't show up... but all too often, a baker is often terrible with those issues of managing the local authorities, regulations, business associations or providers as they go.  If I've worked in a flour mill, I'll see things in the flour I'm given that another baker would never see, assuming that all flour is always the same, given that it's only "flour." The more we know, the more we can see, and the more we see, the more we can adjust for it, plan for it, and fix the problem when it arises.

Yet, of course, people get into business knowing nothing except what money looks like. They start restaurants without knowing how to cook, or start clothing companies without knowing how the wider industry works, or publishing books supposing that when a printer tells them what to do, then that's obviously right. After all, the printer must know what do to.

Except that the printer's concern is the printer, no the buyer; just as the cooks who do know how to cook also know how to steal food from the owner, just as the bartender knows how to water drinks for tips, or the cloth merchant knows how to swindle a rube with third-rate cloth.  One reason why that bakery run by eastern Europeans seems never to close or go broke is because those who run it began in a host of industries, when they were young, that supported bakeries.  They worked in sugar or flour mills, they carried sacks by the hundreds every day, they made their contacts and they kept them... and they continue to do that, silently, patiently, never trying to open another location, because getting rich isn't their goal.  Baking bread is.

So, what does any of this have to do with D&D?

Our attention to detail matters, not in the game world, but in the real one. That said, however, the decision to bend ourselves to rules that we perhaps do not understand at first glance, or commit ourselves to a difficult game structure that we feel certain we can get better at it helps impress skill-sets that repeatedly come to serve us later, often in ways we can't imagine.  We might not think that opening a module, reading through it and then presenting it to players is a "skill-set," but we do precisely the same thing when we're given a company policy that we're to present to employees, who must accept the policy as we provide it.  Knowing how to present the module in a way that encourages the players to sign on helps with teaching employees that they, too, have to onboard themselves if they want to continue working here.

Of course, all that's ruined when present-moment Hasbro D&D tells the DM to be a dancing monkey. But we can leave that discussion for another day.

Traditionally, DMing has been an authority based role, one in which we manage people. Moreover, apart from the process of answering questions, filling in details, staying one step ahead of the clever player, not letting ourselves get manipulated by a player (in the same way as the baker above not being tricked into thinking a poor employee is indespensible), DMing also builds confidence, a work ethic and a sense of responsibility.

One thing that is rarely discussed in all the questions and answers about how to get players to show up to games is this:  the DM always attends.  It seems to go without saying, but it does get to the heart of the issue.  The players may or may not be turning up because of what the DM says, does or fails to do, but we can at least assume that if the DM is there, and ready to run, then the DM is committed. It wouldn't be the first role in our lives we'll engage in where we're show up ready to run the place, only to find the employees haven't.

DMing, even bad DMing, requires a discipline that players usually don't have. Prep of some kind has to be done, competence of some kind has to be gained, a willingness to adopt authority with one's friends or acquaintances, and in many cases, with total strangers, has to be assumed. Doing so requires grit, tenacity, a vision in what ought or what ought not to be accepted from players and a resolve that, however difficult it may be, we're going to keep at it because we like this game that much.  All these traits translate very, very well to the real world, when we're put in a position of authority.

Not that the world knows this.

I have "dungeon master" on my CV because I'm at a point in my life and my career that I'm not interested in working for someone who doesn't know what D&D involves, and I don't have to. It's a luxury I didn't have once.  For those who know, it's an eyebrow-raiser... and for those who stare at it, wondering why this person is including a "game" in their resume, it's a fast way of identifying employers I'd never want to work for. But for the employer who knows what that is — well, these past few years, that employer has proved to be a good fit for me.

Point in fact. In 2017, I worked briefly, four months, in a bakery, as a four-hour a day employee, four days a week, which did involve me doing the cash-out. I was trusted not because I was a D&D player (oh, how I was in bad straits those days), but because of my university degree.  Point in fact... I learned more as a DM than I ever did in university. Unless you want me to explain at length why the Roman Empire was inevitable.

I can tell you how a bakery functions because I worked in about a dozen restaurants off and on for 25 years, going back to when I was a kid. And I pay attention. That is really it. Paying attention. Effective DMing isn't about listening, it's hearing the phrases behind what's being said... the subtle clues that indicate the player wants to hedge or effectively "steal from the till" when we're not looking. Because just like employees, players will. They can be your very best friends, but where some personal gain is at hand, and you turn out to be a softie, concerned that they're having a good time, they will quietly and consciously manipulate and make you feel that they're presence is completely indespensible to your campaign. And many DMs, knowing they're doing this, will let them, thinking, "Well, it's social, right? It's a game. And I don't really care if they earn what they get."

Sigh.

Well, there are DMs and there are DMs.  And while the above describes my experience, it has to be said... there are a great many dungeon masters who should never manage anything.  Just like there are many, many people who seem to have money to start businesses they should never be allowed to start.

But of course karma pays this. Because such persons never learn anything, while their money is better in my pocket than theirs.

The advanced-copy September issue of the Lantern will be available tomorrow.

In D&D, There's No Such Thing as Superstition

In most fantasy writing, it's made overtly clear from the start that the monsters are real, the magic is real and that the modern rationalist lens for things need not apply here. Very often, an author starts by breaking the fourth wall, having a character think something like, "The dragons arrived in Septivus Canyon when Friedrich was a boy, and he had grown up hearing and reading about them."  This nails down the concept at once: "dragons are real."

The Lantern, however, does not do this. Since the framing of the writing is a broadsheet that talks not to the reader, but to other residents of the game world, it would be ridiculous for the editor to include such a line as the one above. Everyone reading, within the setting, would already know about Septivus Canyon, and how long the dragons had been there. Such details wouldn't be explained, they'd be referenced "off hand," said without preparation, thought or ceremony. Thus Fleetmarsh the editor talks about the magic missile casually, as something everyone knows, presented in the same register as lost goats, the weather or complaints about bill collectors.

Yet, even after consuming the magazine, the modern reader still assumes that Theral's Red or Snellcrake's draught is hokum, a snake oil, not real, not effective in the way the advertiser proclaims it. And this permits me to play a very clever mindgame with the reader, where their habitual superstition — and their habit of viewing D&D in meta terms — let's me pull the rug out time and again, probably as long as I wish.

It goes to the critical lack-of-connect that comes from the books and the modules and the cookie-cutter approach to running D&D. Even as we "pretend" to fight a dragon or an orc, or "pretend" that this ability gives +2 to our ability to leap this gorge, we lose sense of what the player would really think as they move through the world: that they're good a gorge jumping, and that dragons and orcs are no stranger to them than snakes and people from Maine.

This, as anyone who reads it, is far more immersive than most DMs achieve.  And it enables those who want to become better DMs to see at once, easily, that we make the game world more real when we don't explain things. Where we simply say, without building some huge justification for why a particular dungeon exists, or the purpose of some high mucky-muck, that the thing just IS.  After all, why would the characters know? When we invent such backstories, it's to inform the PLAYER, not the character... and is that really the goal here?

When the setting just is, without justification or lecture, the players must inhabit it directly rather than hovering above it, sifting through the DM's long, boring descriptions of the thing they haven't yet seen... in the same way we do our taxes.

For those who have read the content, consider the Priory for example. We learn nothing about how it was built or for whom; why it hasn't been knocked down, or why it declined. We learn a few rumours about others who may or may not have come to a bad end on account of it, but these rumours are neither confirmed nor supported by what the adventurers find. That leaves a huge open-end to the whole concept, since we're left with, "Is that really how such-and-such died?" Which as DM we don't have to answer, because sometimes... and say it with me now: nobody knows. Seriously, nobody, not in the game setting.

Thus the players are denied the comfort of omniscience. If we won't tell them, because arguably no one in the character's sphere actually knows, then the players also do not gain the comfort of being reassured. Is the wolf in Hennock just a wolf? Fleetmarsh doesn't know. His readers don't know. Perhaps the only ones who knew were able to hold that knowledge for just a few seconds, before... well, you can guess.  That puts doubt in the player's minds, even as it suggests that surely, a wolf in a typical English countryside can't be that dangerous.  Can it?

It builds tension because with it, stripped of the assumption that the DM's going to make sure the wolf in their path is manageable at their level, the players must have courage.  That's what's been lost in modern D&D.  Yes, the gallimaufry has gotten ridiculous, roleplaying has obliterated game-playing, incompetency is all that a new player can expect from a DM, who learned as much from the DM before... but the most sabotaging concept that has truly made the game boring is the total lack of courage.

Now, JB at Blackrazor likes to say, and accurately, that D&D is about adventuring. But adventuring is about courage, which is sorely lacking in people who lose nothing except their pride if a character is killed. But in this day and age, pride comes in dribs and drabs, it seems, and none have pride to spare. So courage, it's believed, must be set aside for surety, if the game's to be fun.

It is a sad state for the game to come to.

The Lantern, then, provides what's missing. These persons, even Geoffrey Fleetmarsh, vain and self-righteous as he is, who strive to learn spells or have lost two of their fingers, having gone to actual war, or urging themselves to go outside the church to discover what's scratching there, are brave. Some are a bit smug and self-important, but they're yet ready to do what we, in this world, would not: actually risk their lives to learn how to do something, and go somewhere, most of us would avoid just as hard as we can. But they're doing it because they believe it's the right thing. Bad stuff has happened... someone really ought to do something.  As Fleetmarsh writes, "Will no one undertake to deal with this menace?"

It is the words of a soul living in the 17th century, when much of the ordinary world was more dangerous than it is now... when going out to the privy on a bad night could have consequences none could guess at. What thoughts must that walk, which must be taken, dredge up in one's mind when the world is full of spiders as big as dogs?

How My Thinking Process Made This

It should come as a surprise to no one that presently I'm deep in the process of getting the second issue, the September Issue, of the magazine sorted and settled, now with the 1st of August being my deadline for pre-purchasers instead of the 21st. I'm in process, but it's engaging and I haven't much time to write blog posts.  I could use some spiced nettle draught right now.

Funny but the second issue is more difficult than the first, as there's an expectation to match what's been done.  The positive feedback that I've received for the first one is unequalled, exhilarating and a little scary. Nonetheless, I'm passed over the feeling that "no it can't be done" into "oh hell yeah, this is great." It's a nice tipping point.

This is my first post not trying to sell the thing, but I can't not talk about it because it's become the single overwhelming concern for me. It's pushed my sales of old books up, it's pushed my patreon up, it's pushed my self-confidence up and, well, I think it's bloody brilliant, myself.

But since it's my nature to deconstruct everything, it's a natural impulse to do so here. I'm not saying that I want to talk about how the "sausage is made," that's not of interest to me. Rather, the question in my head begins with the moment of inspiration that brought this about (and I'm listening, weirdly, to Grace Slick telling me to remember what the door mouse said as I write this).

I was looking at some of those magazine cover memes that people throw together about politics and other things, where they choose a picture and then badly design the outcalls on the front, like The Onion does. That got me to thinking, "Hm. I wonder how hard it would be to take one of those covers and actually flesh out the entire interior of the magazine..."

You know, actually design a mast head, make the art, write the articles, be as absurd as the cover is, not worry about whether or not it's true. I mucked about for a bit with that, off and on... this would be about mid-last month. And got to talking about it with my daughter, because annoying daughters with stupid grandfather stuff is how the world works. Or ought to.

It was a day or so after that when I began to think... "Isn't there some way this could work for D&D?"

As it happens, I have a very dense game world, not only because it's based on the real world, but because of the way I think about the real world.  Over the last couple of years, I've been playing with all sorts of possibilities that are available now, that weren't a few years ago, specifically in the crossroads where A.I. and Googlemaps meet.  To explain this, I have to include a passage here from a book I'm never likely to finish, but which I mess with because sometimes I just want to relax:

"Oh," Anya replied. Reaching out, touching the button, a panel glided open — revealing a hidden, chilled compartment, from which emerged a hint of cold mist. Crystalware glasses, etched with the Rolls-Royce mirrored 'R's, were just in reach. "Thank you," she said to Marshall, seeing intuitively where ice and water came from.

"Certainly, Miss. The black button opens the other bar, but I guessed you might want to keep your head clear."

"Yes, definitely," Anya replied, feeling the Rolls ease into motion as she filled a glass, the weight of the crystal strangely grounding in her hand. Without thinking, she drank it down in a single draught, as if the coolness might steady her. Resting the glass upon her forehead, Anya asked, "Do you mind if I ask... if it doesn't bother you while you drive... how long have you known Ms. Hedges?"

Marshall flicked her a look in the rear view mirror and considered as they crossed Park Avenue. Then Madison. "Unless I miss my guess, Miss Frost, you were hired today. It's your first day of work."

Keeping an eye upon her and on the road, he saw her nod, saw the reluctance to speak. Easily, Marshall turned the car onto 5th Avenue, adding, "I don't work for Ms. Hedges, but for an agency that provides specific drivers when requested... but I do remember my first day working for her. If you'll allow me to tell you." He stopped for the light on 54th street.

"Please do," Anya replied, eyes meeting Marshall's in the rear view.

"I didn't know her but I'd heard another say she was politely reticent; she dislikes any sort of interaction, such as we're having now. That day, she directed me out of the city, towards Scranton and Carbondale. It was bitterly cold... in the minus twenties. She wore a fur coat and had a mink wrapper stretched across her legs, while I had these—" he showed his leather driving gloves; "—and a suit jacket much like I'm wearing now."

The light changed and the phantom slid forward, making a lane change once they were past the intersection. "The first stop we made was outside Honesdale. One of those old-money places where the house spreads out and sits on a lot of land. Ms. Hedges had me stop... and as a woman in the house emerged, Ms. Hedges cast off the furs and slipped into a plain cloth coat. They met, hugged and went inside. I could see they were friends. In the car, I let the engine run hot and got by, even as frost grew on the windows."

Traffic on 5th flowed well, as they crossed 55th, then 56th. "She reappeared after an hour, the woman in the house with her; again they hugged, and talked a bit longer, before Ms. Hedges came to the car. Then, as she changed her coat—" Marshall slowed down and stopped for the light on 57th; "—she gave directions for our journey in a most impatient way. I wanted to ask, but of course I didn't; we went to a little place called Mehoopany, in the Poconos. Another sprawling ranchhouse, another change of her coat, another woman waiting on the porch. I watched the same scene play out again and began to wonder."

As the turn signal clicked, Marshall smiled into the rear view, engaging Anya again. "I don't know what was going on. We went to a third place; not far away. Lawton I think it was. Same scene, same embraces and the same hesitancy before separating. I don't think Ms. Hedges was disturbed by it, not exactly; each meeting looked to be with friends. But I saw that it was wearing on her."

The light changed and Marshall turned west onto 57th. "It wore on me, too. I'd been six, seven hours in the car, my feet ice cold despite the heater, my hands stiff as I held the wheel. If there'd been an opportunity, I'd have stopped and purchased one, but every place we stopped was in the country." Without malice, he paused before saying, "I must admit, I said a few unpleasant things in the car as I waited, you can imagine."

"It must have been a very long day," Anya replied kindly.

"It was. But when Ms. Hedges got into the limo after the third visit, she directed us towards Towanda. I followed the GPS and got us there, where she had me drive down main street. She told me to stop, in front of a men's clothing store, and said, 'You must be cold. Wait here.'"

They crossed 6th Avenue. "I still hear her saying that," he said. "Matter-of-factly; and she went in, bought me a rich, fine mohair coat and a pair of gloves, I don't know how much it was... but she compelled me to accept them, and not consider the cost." He chuckled. "You've seen already, no doubt, what she can be like."

The Phantom passed Carnegie Hall — Anya saw that Matteo Rüttimann was to begin a week-long engagement. "I've seen it," she agreed.

"Then you know. I was grateful. She settled into her seat, directing me back to New York. It was well after dark before I brought her home."

They sat silently, crossing 7th Avenue; the Phantom stopped again for the light on 8th. Anya's gaze drifted to the familiar stone facade of the old Hearst Magazine Building, before Marshall turned in his seat and looked at her. "She may not seem to care; but she does. I've look forward to driving her — not because we're friends. We're not even acquaintances. But she deserves to be treated with the greatest respect. If I'm her driver, I know this is what she gets." He paused. "I'm going to drop you off right there, just past the green awning on the right. I'll be back to collect you at four."

No one has to read this... it's merely the best way I have of describing the headspace that brought me to The Lantern. The above is telling two stories about two different geographical trips. One through New York City from the Citiplaza Centre (where that building that every youtube creator says is going to fall down) to the corner that, yes, has the Hearst magazine building, where Cosmo comes from.  The other covers an area of Pennsylvania and upstate New York. And if the reader knows either of these parts of the world, they'll know the locations and timing is accurate.

But here's the thing. I've never been to New York. Or upstate Pennsylvania. But I have streetview in GoogleMaps, so all the houses in Pennsylvania that the story stops at, those are all real.  The corners in New York, too. I paced all the dialogue driving through New York by word count, because it's one continous stream of conversation.  Essentially, I drew it like a screenplay, if I actually wanted to film the car moving along those streets, all in one shot.

Why?

Not sure, really. Because I could, certainly. It's been two years and some since my eyes were opened about ChatGPT, which no one talks about, save a few people in my actual real life orbit.  I assume there are others, but they don't share it on the 'net, probably because they'd sound as crazy as I do right now. Because they'd have to post large sections of a story that no one's read, to get the point across.

Presently, we can ask anything.  And because we can also check any answer we get, pretty easily, we don't have to wait for google to skew our searches, or hope that other search engines won't. We can just ask, making the question as complicated as we wish, and go on asking question after question as we shape and build and design, well... anything. I don't have to live in New York. I have all the images of New York, through Google street view, that I need.  And now I have a program that can describe every image.  I can even screen shot the image off Google and give it to chat and ask, "what is this?" and get the answer I want.

And what are we talking about? Whether students can cheat on tests. Whether artists can still function. Uh huh. It's 2025. I think the 20th century is done. Yes there will be artists. But those doing it the way it was done 40 years ago? Um... no, probably not.

All right, put all that aside. How do I publish a magazine for D&D?

'Cause that was the question.  I'm thinking about The Onion and trying to adapt that to D&D, which of course got me thinking about the Dragon Magazine, and how much I hated it, yes in 1981, because it really was such a shitty, shitty, shitty product.

And no, I didn't get to liking it later.

What bugged me then was how really worthless it was for my efforts as a DM. As a map guy, growing up in a world where floor plans are, um, everywhere, it wasn't of much use that a magazine about D&D thought what I needed were a lot of really badly made, not well scaled maps with extremely low detail, since I could pretty much draw this in less than a minute. The notion that I should "get excited" about this bothered me then, and it really bothers me now when people still talk about the Dragon as though it were some amazing thing.  The "life cycle" of the ochre jelly?  What the fuck am I supposed to do with this?

Though yes, I probably could do something with it now, I'm a lot smarter... and I have chat. But the original article is no doubt so bad, I'd do better to start with the title and nothing else.

Yet, here I am, five weeks ago now, thinking, couldn't I do the Dragon better somehow?  I mean, the real issue wasn't the staff's mediocre sense of anthropology or biology, or their crippling outlook on historical politics or social structure, or even their cut-and-paste approach to dungeon making. The real problem was that they didn't take any of it seriously. For them, it was a game — no, not D&D, the magazine.  I mean, nothing these guys did really mattered... they were just selling their stuff to an audience less bright than they were, in a market with no competitors, to a core audience with only a few alternatives to pick from (which could likewise be easily covered)... while at the same time, there was no way they could be "wrong" about anything, because it's all just make believe anyway. None of these things are real, right? Want the life history of the goblin?  Just make it up.

On some level, I appreciate that. Except that, apart from the magazine, the players in the game campaign DID want a certain degree of consistency, which the magazine wasn't. Not even remotely. Which of course matched the audience, which hard as it is to believe, were actually more ignorant then than they are now. It's just that all the ones still with us from back then, like me, educated themselves. The true idiots, whose money nevertheless supported the magazine, quit the game and ended up selling insurance.

All right, you can see, I have some issues. Fair. But because they didn't take it seriously, the writers and self-styled gurus of the culture all ended by representing themselves as fatuously "above it all," beyond criticism... which is really a terrible place for a writer. If you don't listen to criticism, and adjust to it, as a writer you just get worse.

Therefore, the problem with the dragon, I realised, was that the writers all lived in the real world. Which put them "above" the game in their heads... and thus, "too good" for it.

What if all the "writers" were inside the game world?  That's where my head went.  What if Geoffrey Fleetmarsh, the editor, was a sort of desperate, haranguing self-righteous publisher, sure that he's always right, yet beset endlessly by incompetents, bill collectors, a readership that didn't appreciate what he was doing and so on? What if the articles were written by people who had been there, suffered the thing personally, and now had a reason to take it to this small broadsheet that'll print it because the agenda is "to shock while telling the absolute truth"?  And if there are ads, they wouldn't be slick and clean and well written... they'd be self-submitted, clumsy, full of nonsense that never ought to be in an ad, but rural truthful too. And since everything was "inside" the setting, then every off-handed comment about a wolf, an abandoned building or a missing drunkard would be "real," and therefore a potential "hook" for a DM to use.

In a lot of ways, the hooks sort of write themselves. The first rule, obey the Dragon and accept that the main aren't going to take things seriously. An edict against casting weather spells indoors?  Absolutely. The inn has a problem with dwarves?  Well, they do throw dishes and bang the table when they sing.  The fellow who fixes wagons doesn't want to travel more than a mile to do so... of course.  And it's not like addresses existed then.  So don't include them in the ads.

But then, because I'm me, and I don't play a game world that's all fun and fluffy bunnies, why not make the world real. I mean, pick a year. 1635.  That's 15 years before the game world I've been designing for 30 years takes place. I know the time period. I know the people, the sociology, the politics. The west counties is a good place for it. Separate from the main land routes, but populated and familiar as an English countryside.  A good mix of sea and land. Ships regularly landing at Plymouth from all over the world. Someone arrives from... oh, Africa, and tells a story. Any story. Any standard D&D warstory, but told from the point of a view of someone in that world, whose been there, and was invested in the outcome.  No autocratic, objective DM's point of view.  Players, experiencing the world and writing the story.  So that other players would want to read it.

I knew how to research this, how to put it together, how to follow each little scene with google maps, what questions to ask, and how to shape the dialogue and frame the concept, in the time frame I have, because of that scene above where I wrote about a car driving through New York City. Each bit of design we do, each thing we learn, gets a later application. I don't worry that I'm "wasting time," because whatever I'm doing now, it'll apply to something later. That's how I became this, and not the guy scrambling to come up with something about ochre jellies.

I was kind of shaking when I thought of this. And I would have dropped it... if this had been 2022.  Because in 2022, there was no way to adequately address what the world was like in 1635.  There would have been no way to produce this much art, this fast, for the cost that would have been, adjusted to both the time period AND the idea that the work wouldn't be limited by 1635 technology.  There simply wouldn't have been a way for a single person to do this, monthly.  Not and have it look like this. If it were 2022, I'd have had this idea and it never would have happened.

And those who have expressed, here and there, their trouble with my use of A.I. art?  I've paid for art. I bought my first piece of art for a publication I was putting together in 1994.  And I have deliberated, discussed, dealt with and paid artists for the last thirty years, when I had to, because I had no choice. Those bringing up the issue, I'm guessing you've never done it... and certainly not as often as I have. And certainly not with the understanding that being able to invent a piece of art in one's head, and have it in usuable form inside of 20 minutes?

You might as well tell me I should walk to New York, because trains put coaches out of business 185 years ago.

Sorry. I can do this now. I'm not going to wait for this to be "all right" for a lot of people who can't cope.

There you are. That's where this came from.  I'll bet the above doesn't make much sense.  A lot of time, when I just throw out a post like this, without planning it, the logic doesn't hold up well.  I go down this side passages, rant, come back, sort of just stumble around to the end, until I run out of "Oh yeah, and..." moments in my head. Which is now.

The Lantern is Now Tiered

Going forward, for those who are interested in seeing The Lantern PDF, copies must be paid for, either by joining the new $7 tier on my patreon or visiting Lulu. The free offer is no longer publicly available.

The response has been thoroughly positive. People recognise that there's an inherent value in locating session hooks into a narrative told from characters inside the game setting, providing a real, tangible glimpse into the lives and doings of those living within it. I personally believe that it's been a sensational idea: present the module not as a stale formula for the DM to follow, but as a structured step-by-step example of how a party may very well react when coming up to this door, reacting to an unknown sound or falling into some peculiar situation. What's strange for me is that I remain so close to the subject material that I'm finding it difficult to deconstruct just what I like about it so much. Those thoughts still elude me, so that I haven't constructed a blog post about it yet.

The September edition is almost done, though it's not set to be published until the 21st of August. As such, I've decided to offer it on the 1st of August for an additional $3 over the $7 asking price.  That's $10 total, which must be provided on patreon.  Those who already give me a $10 donation on patreon are set up, but if anyone else is anxious and don't want to save $3, you can get on board now and for every month going forward.

Final Days of the Lantern's Free Access

Just wanted to write a brief note: the first issue of The Lantern, issue for August 1635, will no longer be available for free on Patreon after July 22.  If you haven’t yet downloaded it, now is the time. After that date, it will remain available for purchase on Lulu:

https://www.lulu.com/account/projects/nv98em7

Thank you to everyone who’s read, commented, or shared kind words so far. Your engagement is deeply appreciated. I’m continuing work on the September 1635 issue, which will release on August 21, as planned.  A preview of the front cover will be provided on the 29th of July, though it can be seen at the end of the video I posted of Elric Swann's reading.

If you have questions about The Lantern, about its construction, its content, its intentions or how I came to conceive of it, then please ask.  I'll answer most any question, provided it doesn't touch on spoilers for future articles.

Let Me Ask the Room

Two questions for the general zeitgeist.

First—has anyone actually downloaded The Lantern's PDF?  Patreon doesn’t tell me, and I’d genuinely like to know if it’s reached anyone’s hands yet.

Second—of Exalted Funeral, Spear Witch, or Tuesday Knight Games, who’s worth reaching out to with this? I’m not asking who you like—I’m asking who’d actually look at it.

The Lantern, no. 1, in full, for the month of August, 1635

Due to inconvenient circumstances, I'm launching The Lantern on my patreon, presently.  It's the 15th of July for most of the world, and I won't have time to do this tomorrow.

You can find the Lantern here, on my patreon.  It will be free for download until noon, Mountain Time, on July 22nd.

Thereafter, it will cost $7 USD, which may be managed either though contributing that amount to Patreon, or purchasing it here from Lulu.  Lulu gets a cut if you do the latter, Patreon gets a cut if you do the former.  Alternately, you can choose to give Paypal a cut, but I haven't used them in a while and I'll have to update my account.

As it states on Patreon, The Lantern is a monthly publication supporting fantasy role-play through the presentation of an early 17th-century game setting. Each issue offers firsthand narratives, regional reports and supernatural accounts written in the style of the time. In this debut edition: an adventure to the Old Priory near Cruwys Morchard, with humour and unnatural dangers. Presented for players and game-masters seeking historical texture and uncanny peril.

This publication is written, illustrated and assembled by me, in support of a larger goal: to offer players of fantasy role-playing games a rich, lived-in 17th-century setting, as an aid to worldbuilding. To that end, it conceptualises people, places, time period and relationships between the land and the events taking place in it.

I hope you enjoy it.

The Priory at Cruwys Morchard

"The Lantern" has been styled as a periodical written and presented as a local news gazette edited and published by a curmudgeonly, strained member of the press, Geoffrey Fleetmarsh. The content he's created includes village gossip, explanations of weapons and training schools, the mechanics of spellcasting and a first-person adventuring account, each of which doubles as inspiration for those seeking to understand the setting from the point of view of those inside it.  Essentially, it's a guidebook on how NPCs live, what they care about, how they perceive their lives... and ultimately, how they might be depicted more immersively by the DM.

Elements of fantasy and game features are included into the text as though these things are perfectly every day and ordinary, while the characters and advertising is frequently poignant, humorous or darkly horrific.  I believe it's wholly unique in the whole lexicon of D&D based material.

The whole magazine will be offered free, as a PDF, through my Patreon on the 15th of July, two days from now.  The above presents pages 14 and 15.  The whole is 24 pages.  On the 22nd of July, I will remove the free offer and thereafter will be charging $7 for it.  A second edition of the "magazine," the September 1635 edition, will be ready for publication on the 21st of August, and it's my intention to continue releasing editions each month, for $7 a piece, for sale on Lulu.  Those contributing $7 monthly to my Patreon will be sent the new edition through their email on the 21st of each month.  Back issues will be available on Lulu.

A reading of one of the articles can be heard by following the link. Examples of the ads from the magazine are included (save one, which appears in the next issue) and a teaser for the "September" cover is also shown. The speech accent feels period-true, with a bit of a rural edge, something British-but-nowhere-specific. It's not meant to be Cockney or posh or stage Scottish, just from the world. I'd appreciate more page views on my youtube, comments and a like if you've got it in you.

And yes—this is now the focus. I’m stepping away from the unfinished long-form projects. That may disappoint a few of you, but the truth is this: those projects didn’t gain traction. Interest was soft. Support was polite. I won’t spend hundreds of hours building something no one will buy. If that’s a hard thing to hear, so be it.

This one—The Lantern—has legs. I think The Lantern is the smartest, most immersive thing I've ever done. I think it steals the heart and soul of the real game from the clumsy, stumbling module format, repainting the latter as something that has happened, not a pantomime meant to be staged.

Master Elric Swann Speaks on Weapons

A video on youtube, as a preview for The Lantern,  as promised in the Opening Card of the last post.

Launching:  https://youtu.be/ARhyMMjfvPE?si=6h2kzdVVR17esb8-

Opening Card

 

The Lantern

 

6b: Known and Unknown Setting Composition

Part 6a: Setting Composition
Part 5: Managing Cognitive Load
Part 4: Projecting Engagement
Part 3: Cognitive Load & Information Filtering
Part 2c: Governing the Game
Part 2b: Setting Player Boundaries
Part 2a: The DM's Mental Toolbox
Part 1: Introduction to Session Management

Apart from the characters' memory, apart from their immediate surroundings, we move onto a discussion of "known unknowns." These are places, things and persons the characters have heard of, and know about, but which remain outside the players' experience. This can include the interior of a building the characters pass every day, or the uncle of a character that lives in another city, or the entire continent of — to pick an example — Asia, which is almost certainly there but which, in a theoretical campaign, the players have never actually been. Thus, known unknowns comprise a tremendous part of the setting.

As with our own experiences, these are not "secrets" or "hooks." They are simply places the players haven't yet investigated. A backpack, apparently filled with something, but which has yet to be opened, is a known unknown. These things are a natural consequence of living in a complex, unmapped, effectively infinite reality. The players, like real people, are surrounded by information of which they possess only the narrowest understanding. And if the setting is large enough, players must likewise accept that there will always be known unknowns. There's no way within the space of a game that played every two weeks, for even six hours a session, for the entire setting to be made "known."

The value of this ambiguity is that, unlike an adventure hook, which exists in isolation so as to manipulate the characters to undertake a specific action, the sheer abundancy of known unknowns allows players to assign their own weight to whatever they encounter. In effect, it's not the dungeon master that elevates the importance of a thing, but the players, through their character's perspective or curiosity. As they pass by a particular habitation, or hear of a dungeon, or the name of a person and their rank, the players automatically self-assign how important each is according to how it potentially fits their goals, fears, hunches and emotional investments. This supports a personalised agency, which in turn makes the players responsible for their actions — and the consequences of their actions.

For example, when in an adventure, the party is assisted by a man, Otto, who gives his origin as a place called "Lothven." During the adventure, Otto dies in a manner that he cannot be raised. The party, having grown attached to Otto, take it upon themselves to take the remains of Otto, or his personal effects, to Lothven, though they know nothing about the location except its name. We are not telling the players to do so; we are merely assigned the task to provide the players a route to Lothven, the presence of whatever it happens to be, as a responsibility we have towards the players. Initially, we may never have had any intention of adding Lothven meaningfully to the campaign; we might have introduced it merely as flavour. But now, the players are creating their own adventure. That gives them agency, it enriches the setting from their perspective, and we have nothing invested ourselves in seeing anything happen except to perhaps put a few random obstacles in their way and provide something interesting to find once they reach the end of their quest.

Through providing hundreds of such opportunities, as dungeon masters we're freed from assigning any importance to anything. We can emplace taverns, towns, rivers, mountain ranges, farmlands, market places and scores of realms and lands without concerning ourselves the least for what's there... until such time as the players choose to go. At that time, we create the path, add details to it, arrange the end locations and enrich as much as we have time for — with this very important condition. Lothven, wherever it is, must have characteristics that make it unique. We cannot just cookie-cut other places with the same shape and purpose, else the players have no special need to go there. No, whatever, Lothven is, it must have a nature that fits not only the place Otto came from, but elements of the Otto that the players knew. This is understandably challenging, since it means we must "make up something" when it's needed, even though we were not the perpetrators of that need.

As such, we must not strive to create "generic codes" for towns beyond their basic structure and presence. We must service the players' choices not only by providing adventure on demand, but by giving their choices weight, respecting the players enough to make every place memorable in its own fashion.

Realistically, then, not every place warrants an adventure. Lothven might be four hovels and a gristmill; but all it needs to have, if we want to give cause for the players to feel good about going there, is one small detail that's "worth it." Otto's mother, weeping, upon being given the things brought a hundred miles to her, says, "Woe is me; one son dead, the other lost forever... what shall I do?"

There it is, an actual hook — but not one forced on the party, but rather surreptitiously given as a reward. This line isn't a demand that the party now search out the whereabouts of the other son — it's the subtle curve in the road that the players may or may not decide to follow. Yet because it's Otto's brother, they may want to learn what's happened to Werner. First, however, we must talk about unknown unknowns.

Beyond what the players have heard about the setting, there are many, many things about which the players know nothing. The aforementioned Werner, for example, never spoken of by Otto, which the players cannot guess at until we speak of it. This is the DM's unexplained prerogative: not only the filling in of gaps in what's already understood, but the vast secret mechanisms of the game world that also exist, whose presence remains an utter mystery until we choose the moment of their invocation.

Some things may be guessed at: it is probable that assassins' guilds exist in the world, but where they are located, or if one is in fact just a few hundred yards from where the players are just now, is utterly unknown. Numerous events may seem perfectly random, but in fact we are keeping it a secret from the party that these things are together mechanised by a cabal, whose purpose has nothing to do with the party. No one knows, presently, that the Duke's son intends, in a few months time, to kill both his father and the king — and so, for the present, only we as dungeon master know it, keeping the secret in our minds until such time that it's right to reveal it.

Our purpose to having such unknowns, and not creating them on a whim, is in part so that we can stir the pot for the players for awhile. They can then imagine they're acting without observation, without the influence of others who are, in fact, ensuring their agency to some degree. This plays in our favour, accomplishing several important facets about our setting, when the reveal comes. To begin with, that all is not as it seems, that expresses that what they see is just a small sliver of a much larger reality — which isn't there to make the humble, but to provide structure for the day when they themselves become part of the manipulators when reaching that capability. Additionally, we establish that the world is going on independent of player knowledge. This provides depth and a sense of purpose to the setting, taking yet another step away from the notion that things happen only for the party's benefit.

Finally, when it's revealed, it doesn't feel like an arbitrary addition. It feels like something that has been earned — a momentum from the "outside" to the inside of things. Discovering the usurpation shouldn't make them feel like the world is too big to manage; it should be done so as to make them feel they're becoming involved in things that really matter. Not as pawns, but as protectors of the king... or, if so inclined, that they have the capability of contributing to the removal of power on that scale. Done right, this should feel like empowerment.

What elevates this approach above a twist-for-twist's sake is the emotional and mechanical resonance it fosters. The world feels earned, not given. The setting mirrors real epistemic growth: awareness, context, larger choices to make, consequential results of which the participants are a part. It lifts them from "just another dungeon" to "what kingdom might we topple today." This drives them towards preparation, gathering of resources, a hyper-readiness that dwarfs the necessity of just buying another sword or picking up a new rope. Now we need ropes and swords for hundreds, perhaps thousands of soldiers — which demands an outlay of resources that can't be collected by raiding a few dungeons. Because the setting is bigger, the players must be bigger too. They're not just heroes any more: they're moving towards becoming majestic.

To envision a game setting this large, the dungeon master must begin to think in layers. As stated already, there are those things in the characters' memories; there's what they SEE; there's what they vaguely know about. Now, there's all the world they do not know, even in reference. The measure isn't just geographical, though — it's economic, social, political, cultural, strategic, technological, with each aspect providing unexpected opportunity and detail. Yet of course we simply cannot draw a setting on this scale as we would a dungeon, which conveys the illusion of total control over every possibility the players might pursue. The world is simply too BIG for that. Mindfully, we must inhabit such a world ourselves, seeing the city and realm with such clarity in our minds that we can make it breathe at our whim — without drawings, maps, lists of character sheets or pretty much everything associated with Candyland-structure role-playing. There's no story; no agenda; no hyper-detailed depictions of room-sized spaces.

Instead, we must embrace "emergent play." This describes a living, layered setting that's too vast to script: one that is run by managing implications, not events. Imagine that the players arrive in a town and encounter an individual involved in a lucrative opportunity: the town is crying out for timber, as shipbuilding is booming in light of a naval conflict that is ongoing. This fellow, Nevis, has just brought in a large shipment of wood from a distant forest, where his family is in the present already logging and trimming another such shipment. As a DM, we must ask ourselves, what are the implications of these details?

The rise of shipbuilding implies a growing demand for many things, not just wood. It implies that the town is relatively safe from the war, or at least protected somehow, so that the docks aren't merely raided by an enemy and destroyed. It implies that Nevis alone cannot supply all the wood that the town needs. It implies that Nevis might need a partner, as he already has invented a supply line. And finally, it encourages the players to ask questions about the situation described, that they might discover, for themselves, what part they'd like to play.

We're not trading in "plot points." These are ongoing dynamics — the depth of which depends on our capacity as DM to understand what's going on, what could be going on, what consequences would arise from what decisions the players make... and ultimately, how the players' choices could change the balance of these dynamics. Inserted into this are moments of sabotage, attempted assassinations, raids, defense of property — great opportunities for combat, plunder, reward, status, acquisition of special items and so on, all without the limitations or repetitiveness of just another dungeon.

For the present, grasping that this form of play is possible is sufficient. It's made possible when the players look at a situation like this from the point of view, "There's a lot of unknowns here, that I can't begin to grasp or understand; but I trust my dungeon master. If I ask questions, I can learn what the unknowns are, which makes them known enough that I can begin to investigate them."

These are the four scales of the setting's composition. We're now free to move on.

6a. Setting Composition

Part 5: Managing Cognitive Load

Part 4: Projecting Engagement

Part 3: Cognitive Load & Information Filtering
Part 2c: Governing the Game

Part 2b: Setting Player Boundaries

Part 2a: The DM's Mental Toolbox

Part 1: Introduction to Session Management

The easiest setting for a DM to run is one that merely frames the players' actions and serves as scenery. This demands very little of us beyond surface description. We need no internal logic — the monsters are here to contend with the players, the residents of the town exist to give the players the information they need, especially for the next adventure. Apart from that, the village or town exists to supply the players' needs. This might be things to buy, special magical gifts granted by non-player characters, a safe place to sleep, healing or recreation. Like a theme park, these NPCs function like workers behind the scenes of the players' experience. They have no lives; their aspiration is to wait for and serve the party when they arrive. Their morality or behaviour is whatever the adventure needs it to be. Some are good, some are moustache-twirling evil, but none need depth because either they exist as the party's allies or their enemies. When they perform, it's role-play theatre, the purpose of which is to provide colour, not consequence. Nuance isn't necessary, as that wouldn't help the players gain experience, become wealthier and more powerful, or feel important as heroes.

Because the NPCs and monsters have no agency, there's no need to think through the logic of their statements or the convenience of their appearing at a specific place or time. Because they're just props, they can present themselves spontaneously as a danger — and when their usefulness in that is done, they can blip out of existence without another thought. Causality does not need to be tracked. Shopkeepers have no accounts to keep, no families to feed, no deliveries to receive. Stuff in their places is just there, ready to be picked off the shelf, apparently without limitation. And the player characters, too, have no real history; a player is asked to write out a few pages to explain the character's "motivations," but there's no concrete idea of childhood, accident, regret, time lived or experience gained in the time between their birth and the moment they enter the campaign. They are blank slates, with no awareness or memory of the world they grew up in.

The simplicity of all this is seductive because it's mechanically easy for the DM to maintain, precisely because it's not a world in any true sense. Everything is a stage set. Empires are borders on a map, which the players enter and leave, dressed up so as to appear marginally different — but in reality, each is just a different land of hats. Every day in this empire versus that kingdom is the same. There are always farmers, always wagons rolling over roads, always the same villages, always the same medieval political structure, etcetera. There are no seasons to keep track of: every day is a California 72-degrees, where the farmers endlessly plough the fields, in the same way, for 183 days of the year — whereupon they change over to harvesting. Because ploughing and harvesting is all farmers do.

All this delivers what the DM wants: a frictionless, low-effort experience where the players get what they want. It succeeds because no one at the table cares or expects continuity. The goal is immediate entertainment, power fantasy, casual group fun — where the absence of agency, sense or causality isn't a flaw. The setting doesn't need to make sense because that's not the game being run.

This correlates with the over time diminishment in the game's experience. Ideals of a deeper, more resilient world faded away in the decades after the game's inception.  The cause was not, however,  attributed to a fault of the setting, but to faults in the game's rules and interpretation. This led to new rules — which didn't and still haven't solved the problem — and inevitably to a growing expansion of game role-performance, in an effort to provide depth the setting does not possess. Since, the misdiagnosis has led to an ever more accommodating and permissive effort to keep the players engaged through every means possible except a correction of the setting's now intrinsically hollow structure. Dungeon masters, lacking a structural setting, have been forced to replace it with elaborate character arcs and exaggerated emotional performances, like circuses or theatres have to do nowadays, in an ever more desperate quest to put bottoms in seats. Because an intense, immersive setting proved too difficult to provide logistically, and could not easily be created from scratch, the community simply "gave up" on it — and now, what has been steadily built up to replace it is proving to be un-runnable and staggeringly disjointed.

To be specific, efforts taken to provide massive tomes dedicated towards "worldbuilding," have proved to be little more than travel brochures designed to entice the players to go there, while providing little value upon arrival. We have drama without weight. The game's trajectory over decades reflects a culture-wide capitulation: because the setting proved too hard to build and too complex to sustain, it's been replaced with an overwhelming sprawl of systems, sourcebooks and advice trying to reverse-engineer depth from the outside in. As a result, we have massive worldbuilding guides full of page count and vocabulary which, once read, prove to be all hat and no cow. There's no machinery behind the façade. It's assumed the DM will simply provide it, on demand — but no tools, no handbook, no defined methodology has ever been provided to make this possible.

An immersive setting assumes the reverse of this. The dungeon master provides the world's setting and no more. Like those in the real world, the people in the imagined setting are assumed to have intentions, aspirations, loyalties and troubles that have nothing whatsoever to do with the player character's arrival or appearance. They do not exist to provide anything for the party. Their exposition, when it's given, reflects what these people might normally speak about regardless of the players. If asked to provide a "rumour," these people have no idea what the player is talking about. The word "lore," a game-industry term, is anachronistic and has no meaning. There are no "arcs," because unlike a story and like the real world, things just happen and don't have to fit into a pre-modelled construction. Events occur because the residents, whomever they might be, sleep, wake, eat, hunt, search and carry forth an agenda that sometimes supports and sometimes threatens the players, depending on what the players want and where they happen to go. No one is "evil" or "good." Everyone is an amalgam of indifferent motivations, gained through their childhood, their personal experience, their allegiances and their concern for one another.

Interactions are not devices to move a plot forward but windows into a complex, autonomous structure. The complexity doesn't need to be flaunted. Initially, the surface of a village's daily life might appear to be staid and uninteresting — but as with the Village of Hommlet, the truth, whatever it may happen to be, emerges piece by piece, through player choices, interactions, the decision to remain or the decision to investigate deeper into puzzling behaviours. Unlike Hommlet, the truth might be anything, it doesn't need to be hidden evil; but it exists not because the players are there, but because intelligent beings pursue both positive and negative compulsions that lead to things they have every reason to keep hidden. The division supplies the dual-narrative: the place as it appears to be, and the place as it really is.

With the players, the DM's first responsibility is to define what the player's characters already know. Characters do not start the game at birth; they have already lived 15 or more years in the setting, so we must assume they have knowledge that we would automatically ascribe to people of their age. They don't need "rumours" to tell them about dangerous places nearby — they have been hearing stories about these places since infancy. They understand the structure of human habitations, who is in authority and what that authority allows. Because they are educated and proficient in weapons, spells, skills and the possession of natural advantages, they have likely visited nearby towns and cities, or crisscrossed the local realm by a number of its roads. They know the names of every important person in the locality, and most likely which groups oppose the general welfare of the realm and themselves. Asking questions about these things shouldn't be interactions between the players and non-player characters, but between the players and the DM, assuming the characters already know what the DM is now telling them.

More than this, characters are products of their world. They have learned not to behave sociopathically. While a player might perceive that there's nothing to lose by burning down the tavern (because the character isn't "real" anyway), the characters themselves would be inhibited by years of indoctrination and upbringing. They would not be able to set the tavern aflame because they could not, by virtue of having dwelt in the game world to this date. In like fashion, the characters have been socialised, trained and shaped by their geography, politics and customs. It's completely natural that they should believe in monarchy as the "correct" form of government; that they should hate the residents of another realm that has fought four wars in the last century with their realm. That the presence of slaves, if the setting permits it, is simply how things are. If the setting is based on a pre-Industrial world, then the ideologies, doctrines and egalitarianism of their industrially-built sentimentality have no place in the setting.

The advantage of this is self-evident: the players are free from an assumption that they're here to sustain social justice. The "justice" of their world already exists as it should be. They don't perceive themselves to be outsiders who have just arrived, with none of the characteristics of these other, alien people. In turn, the DM is freed from having to explain patterns of behaviour in terms of present-day beliefs or morality. We can, of course — if the players decide they want to eliminate slavery as a social construct, they're perfectly free to do so, though they might pause and think about the enormity of this task as it would have been, say, in the 14th century. But realistically, it shouldn't occur to them to do so, any more than it should ever occur to anyone to spontaneously, for giggles, to burn down an establishment. Because of this, as the governing body of the game, it's in our rights to demand that players recognise these restrictions, and hold them to it. We are here to play in another space and time, not to impune these fine people with their lives through disdain and contempt for something they thought, at the time, was perfectly right. Just as we assume we're perfectly right now.

This is what it means to roleplay in another time and place. Not to carry present righteousness as a badge, but to live honestly in the assumptions of the age. The justice of that world is not ours, and it doesn't need to be. That difference is not something to correct — it is something to play.

Traditionally, information in a bare-bones setting has to be carefully hoarded, because there is so little of it. Since every bit of knowledge the DM has about the keep or the caves the players will adventure into is critical to the game experience, DMs are naturally reticent to give out anything beyond what is strictly allowed, given where the players are or what questions they ask. In the more immersive setting, however, knowledge ceases to be at a premium. Like with the real world, it's impossible for the players to know everything — more and more information only invites more questions. Therefore, we need only decide what a player's character should logically know according to their past and their present skill-set... and give this information freely. Everything else, we simply say to the player, "You don't know." Eventually, once the player understands enough about the world to feel comfortable acting in it, we can move onto the next setting knowledge we're meant to provide as dungeon master.

At all times, we must have an accurate, solid idea of where the players are in the immediate moment — and we must be able to communicate the sensory and positional information about this location exactly enough that what we see in our minds is what the players see in theirs. It cannot be a game of telephone, where the message is garbled or convoluted. As such, we need to habitually check the players' knowledge: the wall is on their left, the open space sweeps out to their right, the tower is 200 yards away, the copse of trees is behind them and to their right, the wall is 15 feet high and made of granite, the ground has surface cover, wild grass mixed with small shrubs that do not block line-of-sight... and so on. The space must have dimension, the players must be able to orient themselves... and most of all, the space must be concretely navigable in some degree. The players must be able to say, "We go across the grass," "we climb the wall" or "we travel along the wall away from the tower," with a surety that as the dungeon master we're prepared for this, whatever choice they make. Any object in the space, whether it's a shrub or a coin sitting on the ground, must include a capacity to be interacted with — remembering that, in most cases in the real world, interacting with a plant or a found coin is unlikely to have much import. Nonetheless, the potential must exist.

This is difficult to accomplish for the new DM not versed in making declarative statements. Our statements about the location of the tower cannot be vague or stated without rigidity. Once named as a "tower" it cannot be lazily referred to as a keep or an outpost. It must have clear attributes in our mind from the moment we've declared its existence — and we must accept its existence ourselves as a responsibility, so that if the players go there, it is made of definable things, it has a logical entranceway, a floorplan, a reason for it having been built, a builder, a resident or a reason why there are no residents. Because the purpose of the tower is not to "give the players a place to adventure," but because "someone wanted a tower there," we must give the tower causality as well as existence. And we must do so unreservedly and responsibly, embracing the tower's existence ourselves, as something we're proud of, not something we regret adding.

It is likewise necessary that we possess an instinctive visual awareness. This describes an ability to imagine a space or object in spatial terms, enabling us not only to describe the dimension of things, but to see past the physical into the lived experience of the residents. If we imagine a village, we don't just see the buildings and the pathways: we automatically see the people, and in seeing them, we grasp automatically that they are about their purpose, moving this way and that, interacting, looking at ease, concerned, happy or whatnot. Each expression, in our imagination, immediately suggests a reason: at ease because all is going well, concerned because of a family member's health, happy because the day is nice. We see the residents as people — because in our everyday life in the place where we live, we're forever conscious that there are others around us, who have trials, urges, hopes, expectations and emotional weights that they're carrying. Many DMs come to the game without this reflective capacity. They travel through their real world with blinders on, never having thought to look into the faces of others, or note daily changes in their environment, or even care if the day is sunny or not. Such persons lack many of the basic skills necessary to make a world "come alive," because their own world isn't.

These are both learnable skills. We return again to the concept of mindfulness, which we earlier described as a contemplative process by which we "thought" at length about our game setting. The process directs us to deliberately walk around a space, starting with our own, looking over and gazing thoughtfully at objects that we ourselves keep. This bit of chintz here, this tapestry, this collection of cups we gather over the space of years... and puzzle out the manner in which each thing we own has come into our possession. We take a walk around our neighbourhood, reflecting on memories we have of the residents in other houses, now and in the past... and consider those places where we grew up, or where we visited, and remark in our thoughts how we would describe those to other people. From here, we give the same substance to imaginary things in our game's setting, reviewing how large things ought to be, how certain races come to have certain viewpoints on the world, why rivers flow as they do. As a body, this knowledge is shored up by reading about the fabrication of things like metal and ceramic objects, how things are constructed, the descriptive nature of personal histories, anthropology, sociology, geography — literally anything that can inform us more about the real world, so we can make our fictional world more real. The effective fallout of this isn't just that we become better DMs... we also become better read and more fashionably interesting as human beings.

The riddle of how we come to see the shape of the village is solved through lived attentiveness: not just observation but participation in the experience of others. This is extremely difficult for one kind of role-player... the kind that retreats to RPG gaming in order to have a social experience, having failed nearly everywhere else due to their demanding behaviour and lack of empathy. Such persons must embrace the flat, featureless game world, because they cannot begin to comprehend a world with residents that are both imaginary AND worthy of consideration.

For everyone else, however, this cohesiveness is a must — and it is learned through sharing the expressions, moods and subtle shifts of other people, not just in personal relationships but always and everywhere. Readers are invited to deliberately seek out places with lots of people and just watch... not just one time, but often, especially since many of us must be with other people a lot of the time. Time on the bus, time eating outside in the office mall, time attending a sports event or seeing a child's play are opportunities to watch and self-query about other people. We don't need to be right in our guesses. We only need to develop the skill that allows us to guess, and thus activate that visual awareness we can use when we make our guesses "real" for the player characters.

This is probably enough for now; the second part will have to be filled out with another post.

5. Managing Cognitive Load

Part 4: Projecting Engagement

Part 3: Cognitive Load & Information Filtering
Part 2c: Governing the Game

Part 2b: Setting Player Boundaries

Part 2a: The DM's Mental Toolbox

Part 1: Introduction to Session Management

It's believed that managing a session is demanding and difficult, what with constant, stressful pressures that both compromise our focus and drain our energy reserves. It's fair to ask why anyone would do it — while admitting that many don't want to, precisely because of what's involved. After all, we must keep the players engaged, we must improvise content, we must juggle unpredictable demands and manage pacing — simultaneously. This would seem to present an insurmountable problem — something which, in discussing session management, we must address.

We should best start by establishing in clear terms what the DM's responsibilities are. First, setting presentation: describing the physical space, maintaining a consistency in the world's environment, animating NPC behaviour and representing dynamic changes that take place in the game world. These would include weather, passage of time, mass movements of people, pressures wrought by food supply and technological equivalency, and all those things that make it possible for the players to feel grounded in a world that also contains magic, monsters, excessive technology, whatever the genre specifies. We're responsible for relaying those things that fall within the players' five senses, and those things the players are able to understand about the setting in the big picture.

Second, the control of this information, based upon the party's personal experiences and things they're told — which may be either truth or deception. We may tell the players they see a wall; that the wall appears to be solid. But should the players doubt us, we have it clear in our minds what the players must say for us to reveal that it really is solid or if it's a deception. This premise can apply to anything in the setting: which means the players must do more than experience the setting — they must, to be sure about it, interact with it. The setting is indifferent to the players. It does not clarify itself; the players must earn clarity through behaviour.

Finally, adjudication. This includes interpreting rules as they apply to the players' actions, in combat and otherwise. This defines what's possible, what can be done physically, by the players against or for the setting. This clarifies the DM's role as governing body over the rules, as previously explained.

This is a tremendous load for the DM. We must not only present the setting, but consciously create two narratives in our own minds: one for what the players' believe, prior to experimentation, and one for what experimentation reveals. This for the vast and considerable scope of the setting, involving incomprehensible geographic spaces, professions, purchasable items, the effects of all those items, as well as every person the players may ever interact with. This on top of knowing the rules cold, so that instant judgments can be made with the precision of a tennis judge calling ins and outs during a match where the ball moves at 140 m.p.h.

We must be clear, however, about what we're not doing, recalling the principle that the DM's responsibility stops at the setting's edge. Tailoring the setting to suit the players loads a considerable and unfair expectation upon the DM that ought to be, and was once upon a time, shouldered by the player. Expecting the DM to take responsibility for the player's engagement or enjoyment is, again, a burden the player should be responsible for, not the DM. While creating a "story," complete with set pieces and curated moments designed for the players is, again, work the DM shouldn't have to do; it is, in fact, the players who are responsible for deciding what they want to do, where they want to go, and what they want to achieve in the setting. We appreciate that there are lazy players, who want to treat role-playing as a form of personal entertainment for themselves; but having several players, each with individual needs and expectations, demanding that the DM satisfy everyone, is too big an ask. If role-playing is going to be a collaborative experience, then let's have it be one: with everyone accepting the responsibility for their own enjoyment, and not demanding this duty of others.

Moreover, again for the benefit of the DM's managing of role-playing's cognitive load, we should remember that RPGs are games, not a means to personal gratification and fantasy. There are conduits for that indulgence: artwork, fiction writing, the use of one's private imagination — all perfectly acceptable pursuits for the individual's expression, with a possibility of achieving notoriety and even wealth through skill and interpersonal empathy. But this sort of fulfillment is and should remain a personal aspiration. It's not acceptable to perceive that another person, one who does not share your fantasy, should nevertheless be responsible for ensuring you achieve your fantasy, merely because some RPGs happen to include the adjective "fantasy" as an activity description. "Fantasy," in this context, refers to the literary concept of a world where reality is tempered with elements of unreality. It does not actually mean that players are granted fantasies through the game's process.

Granted, those who have been misled, who have been inaccurately encouraged to redefine the DM's role as they see it, will contend with this position. Some will argue vehemently, taking the position that because we are a DM, we are responsible to them: a form of obligation that exists nowhere. It's structurally absurd to attach this viewpoint to a leisure activity. Moreover, this responsibility they wish to impose is not necessary to run the game. That others think otherwise is of no consequence. Their power over us can be obviated easily: they depend on our accepting their argument. Their dependence is not a position of strength.

Having dispensed with this invented responsibility to others, we are left with our responsibility to the game, which is real and follows those precepts described. At the outset of our dungeon mastering experience, these can be filtered also, to again reduce the strain on our mental energy. The dual narrative, for example, can be initially suspended — we can, if we so choose, present things exactly as they are, without exception, until we're ready to engage with both. For example, without this duality, if a group of enemies confronts the players with the intent to kill, we can accept this as fact. Their motives can be simplified; their sense of right and wrong, black and white, can likewise be assumed. This is not the end-goal: but where our effort to grasp and overcome the cognitive load of role-play is at stake, we can make this concession for the present, assigning our stretch into a more multi-dimensional setting structure for another time.

This stretch would include the enemies' motivations as part of their initial attack: are they really aggressive, or do they feel wronged? Are they being manipulated by an unseen force? Would they, in fact, be open to parley and negotiation if the players shouted, over the initial swordplay, that they "Come in peace"? Such additional characteristics, later, should be part and parcel with the game's setting. Imaginably, these would not be mere things for the players to fight and overcome — but would, by our scaling up of complexity, be driven by those motives that might influence anyone: the need for safety, stability, things they don't have, a desire to expand their control or their potential lack of agency due to a force more powerful. We may imagine anything — and yet present the creatures exactly as before, mere marauders with no more self-conception than what the players choose to believe. Such is the dual narrative we described: that there is more going on in the setting than meets the eye, though what "meets the eye" is what we are always responsible for providing as DM.

Because this dual narrative can be factored incrementally, we're not bound by a binary assumption that either the dual narrative is highly complex or non-existent. As DMs increase in skill, deferred knowledge not immediately evident can be introduced gradually, as we build our capacity in-game, expanding the game's functionality without becoming overwhelmed.

Setting that aside, however. What we're left with is the base sensory presence of the setting and the adjudication of the rules. This latter, too, can be mitigated — not by discarding, simplifying or imposing arbitrariness in place of the rules, but by strengthening our comprehension of the rules, both with regards to their purpose and their construction.

We benefit when we introduce new characters to the game who are limited in their skills, powers or technological access. This reduces the number of descriptions with which we must be fluent. It also provides a measure of containment upon the players: the world is too dangerous, in the main, for them to assume confidence or believe themselves to be important. This is something we should stress when introducing them to the game. We should not rush to make them more powerful, largely, because we're still just learning the game; until we fully grasp the effectiveness of low-level tools and traits, we should not assume the responsibility of comprehending mid-level or high-level equivalents. Should we rush to do so, we're bound to find ourselves quickly out of our depth, and the players dance rings around us through the use of skill sets that we don't know well enough how to regulate.

Narrative humility — the players are not the centre of the world, nor are they safe in it — provides an existential clarity that reinforces the game's ruleset. Rules exist as boundaries, dictating what the players can and cannot do. Suspending the boundary on a rule, even a little bit, risks increasing the player's self-importance, perhaps deluding them to believe that with this change, they ARE safe in the world. That small bit of confidence can be their undoing, easily, especially when we impose some other rule which we haven't changed. A good example would be the presence of dice, which are indifferent to player confidence. The smack-down that results, the set-back experienced by an over-confident player, is more traumatic than what a vigilant, threat-aware player feels.

The resultant fall-out of the set-back can easily undermine a player's respect for the rules. In turn, this can create a campaign-destructive loop: the DM, wishing to placate the player, mitigates the die roll, which increases the players' confidence, which requires another adjustment, so that round and round we go until all rules and all consequences are suspect. This is why we must first understand any rule fully before making a change to it, and second why we must stress to the player that the change in the rule in no way should make the player feel safe, because consequences that result regardless won't be mitigated. Otherwise, the cognitive load of trying to keep track of what rule changes have occurred, or what ought to occur, and what conditions must be observed to assure that a harsh consequence befalls a player, soon compromises our ability to properly run other aspects of the game that we should be prioritising.

Rules can be changed: but never in-game and never without first understanding all the implications of that rule, not just those that might affect a given situation. This allows rules to help us maintain order. Our minds are clear when the players understand, also, what the purpose of the rule is, and why it is so limited, not only from their perspective but also ours. We have a reason for respecting a rule because of what it allows us to present in terms of the setting; the player's wish to change it cannot be the priority.

Thus, when sharing out skill sets, at the start of each session, time should be taken to explain what the skill is meant to allow, its limitations, how we see it from our vantage point, and why such and such point won't be changed. At this time, the players can ask questions, make proposals and suggest circumstances where the rule may need reconsideration. Yet we make the final decision about that, and we make our decision based on what our setting requires, and what we're able to cognitively manage... and not on what the player wants or feels.

This establishes that rules are not merely mechanical assets, but negotiated points of interaction between setting logic, player understanding and our adjudication. Agreed, conceptual communication is an absolute necessity: the players should be as versed in their particulars of those rules governing their abilities as we are — and must, particularly, be on the same page. This reduces chaos and misinterpretion in game, subsequently reducing our cognitive load, making us better able to manage the game's more important detail, the conveyance of the setting.

We'll discuss this in our next class.