Greater Turkestan

Just a look at my recent mapping efforts of western China, the Tien Shan and the Karakoram mountain ranges, using my new map coloring design.  This has been many hours work, more than 60 on the Taklamakan/Tarim Basin alone.  Much hand drawing in this.  And quite a lot of reading of thin historical sources.

Represents content on four different sheet maps.  Sorry I can't give a better resolution at this time.  If you open it as a link in another window, it will give you an expanse icon and you can see more detail.

Diversify

If you run a world that suffers from uniformity, where all the countries seem the same, and where one town the party finds is a cookie-cutter semblance of the town before, and the town before that ... then you must invent diversity.  For your first go-round, I urge you to go slow.  Think of the marks you make on your world being like the symbols a tattoo artist adds to skin.  Whatever you do, you want it to be permanent.  You want not to regret it later.

What is diversity?  It is the pattern a society develops because of its land, resources, climate, historical happenstance and moments of genius that have popped up year-by-year.  A region becomes militaristic, idealistic or factionalized because of its relationships to other regions, the certainty of peace and its relevant wealth.  Some countries are destined to be slaves; others, to be masters.  Without Earth's history to sort this out for you, you will have to look at your world map and settle this yourself.  Don't fall into the mistake of thinking every region wants the same things; or values one universal treasure above all things.  Not every country loves money like Americans do; or religion like the Italians do; or solitude like Russians do.  Find a distinguishing, unique personality for every region ~ but like I say, do not rush into it.  Give yourself a great deal of time and thought before making a decision.

There is an old trope called "planet of hats": a condition where all the inhabitants share a single defining characteristic.  I don't encourage this as a solution, but I do urge the reader to use it as a jumping off point.  As TV Tropes explains,

"To some degree, this is unavoidable; you have only so much screen time or page space to develop and explore a culture."

As a DM, you have scores of cultures to create, so to some degree you're in this same boat.  But if you give the matter thought, you can see how the trope can be a short term solution, leading to greater and greater specifics ... in the way that the Klingon culture evolved over different series, as more and more thought was added.

Initially, you can designate a generalized wardrobe for five or six different cultures; perhaps, in some cases, for specific character races.  This wardrobe can be defined by the types of clothing worn, but also by its color.  Perhaps in the country of note, a particular seashell enables the cheap creation of a violet-bluish dye.  Or perhaps orange, or brown, or white.  Coupled with a clothing style, a player character moving down the street can tell the locals from the foreigners ... and we may suppose the foreigners are proud to wear the colors and clothes of their home country.  Just as they've all been trained to use a select kind of weapon, or carry specific charms or types of carry-all.  Perhaps they wear a kind of shoe, or like a particular beverage or food, one that reminds them of home.  Then, if the player stumbles across a bar deliberately made for members of another region, every one is suddenly wearing violet robes with headbands, and speaking in deep accents or another language.  If the players are looking for information about that region before going there, they should look for this kind of establishment.

Don't rush into making a bunch of details for every place in your world.  Make a few; and then as you run these groups in a campaign, let your imagination expand on what's already there.  Within a few dozen runnings, you should have three or four somewhat fleshed-out cultures ... and your players will begin to recognize them, and perhaps ask specific questions about what those people do, or like, or believe.

Thereafter, it can become much easier.

Villains Eat Breakfast

When I think of a "villain" to insert into a game, I do not think of someone villainous.  That is to say, I don't create a melodramatic, pantomime Disneyfied stock character with a single motivation.  Monsters suit that stereotype, because the monsters themselves are built in such a way that nuance is not part of their design.  A lich is somewhat focused.  Beholders, too, are rarely Renaissance-like in their outlook.  But intelligent, humanoid villains, the sort who had a mother (at least long enough to birth them), should not be wooden of personality.  Especially because they don't have to be.

It is supposed that to make a really good villain, or a really evil one if you prefer, it is necessary to fill them up with the worst possible qualities.  Villains are ruthless, cold, sadistic, narcissistic and whatever else we can cram into this empty-souled shell.  But I don't think of villains this way.  Villains eat breakfast, and like their eggs done in a particular way.  Villains can enjoy a good joke.  Villains get tired, and feel the need to sleep comfortably, in a comfortable bed.  It's all very tropey to have villains eat the worst-tasting gruel imaginable, never laugh and prefer sleeping on a wooden plank at night, preferably made of gnarled wood, but really.  A villain is not a monster.

Villains are people who do not think they are villains.  They're quite capable of seeing their choices as reasonable, even beneficial to others.  They've witnessed how the world works and they have a clear insight as to how to make that world better.  Obviously, the villain should be in charge.  Look who is in charge now, and how badly all this is going.

Villains can be generous.  They can make friends.  They can show loyalty to their followers.  They can make a deal and keep it ~ even if it does mean, sometimes, that it is unfortunately necessary to execute a deal-breaker.  I'm saying that, for the most part, a villain can play just like an ordinary person, who happens to believe they're right and everyone else is wrong.

This works so much better in game, because it is so much harder to kill an apparently generous, charismatic, evenly-tempermented person.  It is easy to kill a psychopath who is screaming maniacally.  But if you're not sure the person even is a villain; and you're not sure he or she isn't redeemable, then the response isn't quite so clear.  If the party blunders into a lair, only to discover it's very little like the lair they discovered, because first they must walk past soup kitchens for the poor, a temple where a priest of the character's religion takes a moment to greet them, only to find that the villain is in the process of having the docks of a nearby seaside town rebuilt after a terrible storm, it is a little harder to pull out swords and scream, "Die! Die! Die!"  Even if the players have seen evidence of some unbelievably awful thing going on just five miles away.  The connection, you see, isn't as certain.

Which should give the villain just long enough to release the killer land sharks.

Dead Cat Bounce

Plot armor is a writer's necessary approach when writing stories where the protagonist's life is regularly threatened.  Presumedly, the reader or viewer will like the character; and will not be happy if the character dies.  Bullets, therefore, can hit the character, but not kill the character.  The character can be poisoned, can fall prey to a brain tumor, can be kidnapped by aliens and be dropped down a well ... so long as things work out in the end.

There is a skill in making plot armor.  It has to be invisible.  Once the presence of plot armor becomes glaringly obvious, the tension in the story is gone.  Automatic survival, when it is understood to be certain by the audience, is boring.

D&D is not a writer's script or novel.  It is a game.  And by the rules of that game, stripped of all the rhetoric and self-aggrandizement, no one has plot armor.  Anyone can die.  In recent years, playing to a more sophisticated audience, writers have been moving towards an understanding that a universe with uncertainty is far more interesting and tension-building than one where most of the cast clanks about in their plot armor.

The risk, particularly in television, where an audience is cultivated for months or years before the death of a favored character, is that the viewer will deeply resent the writer killing their favorite character.  People get attached.

The question arises, is attachment a sufficient reason to circumvent the rules of the game and give player characters plot armor?  Clearly, many people think it is, because many games ~ and DMs ~ insist wholeheartedly that "a good game" demands less heartbreak and a corresponding amount of fudging on the DMs part to ensure no one dies, who should not die, unless the circumstances are such that dying seems like a proud, heroic, profoundly emotionally satisfying thing to do.

For reasons I can't guess at, I don't share this morbid fetish for sacrificing one's life for the good of the country.  I've always thought the important thing was to live and thus go on contributing to the experiment, and, like Patton, to succeed by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.  I consider death to be a pretty stupid way to contribute to anything; and that there is nothing sadder than a corpse, no matter what it died for.

Death, however, is inevitable.  And part of the process of moving from childishness to maturity is to recognize the fact of death, without the glitz and romanticism that a fetishist adds to make it palatable.  I'm not glad when a character dies in a film or a book.  I am reconciled to it.  I acknowledge that I can't change it.  In the light of friends and family passing away, at this awful time or any other, I accept there is nothing I can do about it.  I don't look for reason.  I don't ask to be recompensed with rhetoric or foolishness.

I know from observance that the game is a dead cat bounce without the ever-present spectre of death.  I don't like killing a player character; and I don't like having to take a hard stand with a player when they resist that finality.  But being a good DM is not all beer and skittles.  Being a good DM demands the ability to look your friend in the face and say, "You lost this one.  You're going to have to get over it."  And knowing, maturely, that within a few weeks, they will get over it, and appreciate the positive qualities that imminent threat adds to the game, making the game both terrifying and magnificent, because it includes loss as part of its fabric.

It is a very shallow person who believes they're serving their friends by eternally protecting them from harm.  Avoiding happiness is not the road to happiness.  People who are afraid of death are afraid of life.

Pandering

I'm the first to argue that players should have a say in the rules of a campaign.  This doesn't mean, necessarily, that the DM should bow to the players' whims, and thus undermine the delicate balance that exists simultaneously throughout the game system.  But the players should be heard and their position, if reasonable, should encourage the DM to adjust the rules.

But despite what might be heard, the players should not have a say about the ongoing campaign, the setting or anything about the world's nature.  I recognize that players want to be pleased; and that they very much want to express their personal tastes where the game world is concerned.  But tough tookies.  The game is a struggle for survival.  And we do not survive by negotiating with the maker.

This puts pressure on the DM to step up and provide a game world that will entice the players, without the players' help.  Some DMs will find this relationship troublesome ... and will approach their game like a marketing survey, ensuring that all the players wants and needs are addressed and reflected in the campaign.  Some will argue this produces a game that is satisfying and pleasing to play.  Mind you, a synonym for "satisfy" is "take the edge off."  And that's what this approach does.

We are not selling the player a car.  We are not renovating the player's kitchen.  We don't want the player to feel comfortable.  The lack of comfort is what we expect the player to overcome. 

Yet this approach involves an element of risk, which makes it unpopular.  The DM has to make a world without getting help.  It is much more reassuring to feel the love of one's players directly, by adjusting and reconciling the world to suit their desires.  Where the alternative involves risking the ire of one's players, because the world frustrates their gratification and asks the players to pit themselves against a system that isn't friendly, DMs cave.

This is how you become the players' bitch.

Inconvenience

This wasn't a thing when the game was being run thirty years ago, but nowadays you'll find yourself as a DM coming up against something call "story inconvenience."  This is described as something that happens during the campaign that fails to move the story ahead or engage the characters, largely because they are more interested in doing something specific and your choices as DM are getting in the way.

There is plenty of legitimacy for this perception.  If the DM has sufficiently whetted the players' appetites for an adventure resolution, and is now jacking the players around for no reason, in order to spin out the adventure to keep it from ending, that's a bad thing.  If the DM decides there are going to be three crevasses that need to be crossed, one after another, because three sounds more troublesome than two, that's a bad thing.  Any time players are forced to repeat actions or experiences without acknowledgement by the DM that something needs to be done to maintain momentum through the experience, there's a danger the players will feel "inconvenienced" rather than challenged.  I have seen, and often heard, of DMs who gain gratuitous pleasure from making players fight six or seven randomly generated wandering monster groups between every narrative advancement.  So yes, I get it.  A game narrative should not play like a shaggy dog story.

At the same time, it is a failing to think that an RPG should function like a constructed play, following the strict principles as laid out by Chekhov's gun.  Not every element of game play needs to be necessary.  There is no requirement that every gun needs to go off.  A play, or a film, is constructed in a bottle, where only the cast members of the story exist.  An RPG's narrative does not need to be resolved and wrapped up with a bow in 120 minutes.  Loose narrative threads in an RPG are a positive feature, not a bug, because they will allow the players to pursue other potential adventures without needing the reset button of a particular home base or quest-giver.  Situations that exist for their own sake can be fun, unexpected, terrifying or highly beneficial ~ and can insert themselves anywhere into the player's activities without being either boring or excessively time-consuming.

For no reason at all, once I interrupted a party's narrative adventure by dropping them through a gate into a completely different game world, with no connection whatsoever to the events that had been ongoing.  The players had to adapt to the new world and solve the puzzle of escaping it, while participating in two or three adventures along the way.  This went on for three months, about 12-13 sessions, before they were able to return to Earth, and then complete the tasks that had formerly concerned them.  No one was bored; no one considered the deviation unreasonable.  Shit just happens.  The game's momentum was maintained and the players enjoyed the change of pace.

But ... inconvenience arises if I ever did it again to the same players.  Once is fun.  Twice is sadism.  The cruelty does no lie in the form of the adventure, but in its repetition.

We should beware thinking that inconvenience is anything more than the identification of some DM's tactic that was simply a bad idea.  To generalize all "actions for their own sake" as inherently wrong, because they suspend the pre-determined story line, is to misunderstand the artistic foundation of RPG-design.  Some car-chases inserted into movies are bad.  Some car-chases are awesome.  The determining factor is not "all car chases in movies are bad," though some think so; but that "only good car chases should exist in films."

An inconvenience is whatever the players think is inconvenient.  This has nothing whatsoever to do with what actually happens, or how relevant it is to "story."  We should not suppose that by implementing Chekhov's gun restrictions on adventure-planning, that we will rid our games of bad moments.  Many, many people react to sitting through a Chekhov play as an "inconvenience."

Upheavals

The ambitious DM may want to add an over-arching narrative based around historical upheavals.  Here it is best to think in terms of the Four Horsemen: War, Famine, Pestilence and Death.  But before we get into specifics, allow me to caution you: don't introduce a gigantic narrative of this type unless you understand how events like this trend and function.  If you know little to nothing about war, and the influence it has on society; or if you cannot fully grasp something like the Covid pestilence that is gripping the world right now; then you are out of your depth and your world will be better without your lack of knowledge minimizing the potential impact these events can have.  Nothing hurts a campaign than to have a narrative fizzle from lack of imagination or competence.

Additionally, when introducing these concepts, do not have them surprise the party.  A huge event produces an underlying, ongoing tension ~ as many readers are learning right now in real time.  This works enormously in your campaign's favor.  Knowing that there is a war going on two or three hundred miles away is enough to capture a party's imagination.  Having that war break out in different districts, perhaps one where the party intended to go, will send a chill.  Add to this the various incidents that accompany such events: assembling soldiers, seizing war materials, increased taxes, encounters with battlefields long after the battles have taken place, the unusual appearance of hundreds of crippled ex-soldiers, etc.

We may apply the same logic to famine.  A famine builds slowly; a poor harvest raises prices, week by week.  Certain foods are no longer available.  Incidents occur where people steal food.  There are hangings of such thieves.  Starving people begin to appear everywhere.  There is no food available in this town, at any price.  Resentment builds towards anyone who looks well-fed.  Crowds of people appear on the roads, moving towards places where they hope food is available.

There are many forms of death that are not included under war, famine or plague.  Natural disasters; horrific weather; political repression; predation by monsters or wild animals; and accidents.  An unusual number of these events can portent some unnatural power at work.  The death of a king or someone important can spark resentment, rebellion, the appearance of competitive factions.  The momentum from such events can build over months; and the aftermath can require months to overcome.

Each of these large narrative arcs can be ongoing while the players are wrapped up in simple mundane things, such as proposed in the last post.  It is one thing for the players to be immersed in following up clues in a book that will lead to the location of some large magic ruby; it is another when that adventure is set against a completely disconnected background of a pestilence ravaging multiple villages in the neighborhood, giving the players reason to pause before simply heading off to the next dungeon or ruin.

Simultaneous Plotlines

The traditional background for characters in literary novels will almost always be something banal and mundane.  This is because the novel's story begins when things get interesting; it is presumed that before things got interesting, they weren't.  Thus Pip in Great Expectations does very little before helping an escaped convict, Edmond Dantes is just a good sailor in The Count of Monte Cristo before being found guilty of a crime he didn't commit, Ishmael has never done anything of note before climbing aboard the Pequod in Moby Dick and so on.

Allowing player characters to make backgrounds out of whole cloth tends to encourage the creation of interesting and complicated stories, which we don't want.  The characters should embark upon their first adventures in D&D as empty vessels, waiting to be filled with memories of their earned exploits and deeds; they should not be old hands at this adventuring notion yet, particularly in a fashion where they can simply invent their purported expertise.  The practice downplays the value added by the game and puts pressure on the DM to provide real game events equal to the delirious fantasies of the players' imagination.  This puts the DM's foot in a bucket, right off, compromising the game.

If the players have no background of note, they must focus not on themselves, but on trying to make sense of the world they have been thrust in.  This heightens their attention towards details they are given; as yet, they have no goals.  They must find them.  The DM is thus free to effect a series of opportunities, which the players may freely grab because they have nothing "going" at the time they start play.

These opportunities need not be part of a single story ~ in fact, I would argue they absolutely should not be.  The world is a complex and vast place, with millions of stories going on at any time; the campaign is not a play or a movie intended to amuse an audience in the space of two hours, but a rolling narrative that is expected to last for 20, 50 or 1000 hours.  We have all the time in the world to insert hooks that lead to multiple storylines, which can then converge, or not, as we design.  While being pursued by an absurd number of bandits, the players stumble across an ancient book that explains the disappearance of a nearby island.  While passing through a village towards the island's location, still eluding bandits, a member of the party stumbles across a thief breaking into a house.  One of the residents of the house, a beautiful girl, falls in love with a member of the party.  The next day, now in the process of getting out of town, avoiding the girl, and the thief's brother, who is angry now that the thief has been arrested, the party stumbles across two of the bandits.  They escape the town, thankfully extricating themselves, and stumble across a travelling troupe of actors.  There they stumble across the author of the book about the missing island.  He's a drunk, and to get information of out him, they must help him get sober.  In the process of doing that, the girl in love shows up.  The player gives in, makes love to her, then tries to send her back home.  She goes, unwillingly; but is then kidnapped by the brother of the thief, to force a confrontation with the party.  And so on.  There is no one "story" ~ but rather, a narrative in which one plot line naturally enfolds into another.

The involvement of the characters is therefore catch-as-catch-can.  To follow any one course, they find themselves dragged into multiple petty difficulties, any one of which may offer an unforseen opportunity or bit of knowledge as the DM is able to provide.  There's never any chance for a lull, because while some one thing might be wrapped up (a deal is made with the bandits) there is always something else that is still ongoing (the thief's brother gets away).

A new plot hook can be introduced at any time.  Events can be significant or not, just so long as they remain interesting.  They don't need to be world-shaking.

But we can talk about those, tomorrow.

Priming

As an opener, we should be clear that running a game world without walls and passages, where the players can go where they will and initiate their own adventures, does take a level of skill.  A world that functions like "a real place" will not come about of its own accord.

We are encouraged to begin campaigns with a dungeon, which is all walls and passages.  We are encouraged to set up a "home base" for the players, which ties them to a single place which, as DMs, we can control.  We're encouraged to provide the characters with a region "backstory," which is designed to prime the players, getting them to respond to the stimulus we select.  Many DMs write out this backstory, and other "essential" details about the surrounding area, so that it can be read often by the players, cementing the information we want the players to concentrate upon in their minds.

These methods work because they allow the DM to motivate the party.  I can persuade you to follow a course of action by putting the idea in your head.  I can adjust your thinking indirectly through phrases and incidents that cause you to think you're making up your own mind about things, where instead you're being influenced.  Clever DMing does this so seamlessly that players believe they're really pushing the boundaries of the world, when in fact they're locked into a predetermined format.  I've done this hundreds of times.

Players will often say that they want plain, direct adventure modelling.  Here is a quote from reddit, where yesterday someone linked one of the earliest posts on my blog (which received much criticism, still, all these years later):

"... I like to have some shiny hooks dangled in front of my face. Give me a nudge towards something enticing and I'll take it. It doesn't take much, but I need a little something. If I'm a Cleric, give me something to cure or banish. If I'm a mage, give me something to research or recover. If I'm a big beefy barbarian, give me something to smash. Don't hold my hand but let me know it's there, and I'll do the rest."

Essentially, he's asking to have his hand held, he just doesn't want it called that.  The reaction is familiar, and comes from experiences with DMs who try to present a sandbox, but do not understand that priming that sandbox is essential.  You cannot just drop people in a setting and expect them to locate an adventure; if you try that, you will get players standing around without anything to do.

At the same time, you don't need to be as bald-faced as the commenter puts it.  You don't need to limit your game world to dungeons and homebases, curing, banishing, recovering and smashing.  These tropes are indicative of a lack of imagination; and the commenter's embrace of them only reflects his preference for cliche over sitting, talking, waiting and indifference.

A game world has to move.  Players have to be moved.  But the hooks don't have to be blatant and shiny, they don't have to be dangled in front of the player's faces, we don't always need to satisfy the crying need for momentum with a dungeon and we don't need to saddle the players with a homebase to ensure a setting that is manageable.  There are alternatives.  Seeing these alternatives needs training; the individual needs coaching to see how priming works.  Blatantly obvious adventure hooks are fine for young, inexperienced children; but adults really do want more.  I want us to see that single-adventure campaigns are juvenile in outlook.  Like a film that includes three or four  plotlines, players should be able to experience three or four adventures moving along simultaneously; so that even as one ends, there are others ongoing.  This eliminates the possibility of boredom, or the post-adventure lull that so often destroys a campaign.

We can talk more about this tomorrow.

A New Direction

I have been giving several matters much thought.

This blog has become something as a dump zone for random musings these last ten months, since my decision to take my principle D&D writing behind closed doors.  That experiment has been both productive and moderately disappointing.  On no account did I expect a rush of subscribers to the closed blog, given that most of those who are able to tolerate my authoritarian, slap-handed way of writing were already supporting me through Patreon.  Nor do I think I pushed the agenda of driving new viewers to that other blog as aggressively as I might have.  I believe that is because I continue to see writing a blog as an enjoyable pasttime and not as a business model ~ and as such, I do not vigorously apply myself every day towards pressing for more money from my readers.

That is a good thing.  That is also a bad thing.  In this time of Covid, with the expectations I have for the economy and my chances of finding work (since I am unemployed), more and more I begin to wonder if this blog, and my writings about D&D, are my only chance of survival.  If so, then in these last 12 years I have made an awful mistake of every allowing my personality to show through the content.

That bridge is burned, however.  That horse has escaped the barn.  Which means either I must invent something so outrageously genius that even my detractors will be interested in donating more money towards my continued welfare, or I must lower my standards in order to create content I know people will pay for.

At this time, I don't know who still reads this blog, who isn't among my energetic and loyal supporters.  Even some of those supporters have drifted away in these very unpleasant times, which is understandable and believe me, they go with my blessing and my best wishes.  Nonetheless, who may yet be reading or no, it is my responsibility to produce content that can and will be read, both by people who do not like me and by people who do not yet know me.

To this end, I have a plan.  Three plans, really, affecting different parts of my online presence.  The plan for this blog is to return to regular Dungeons & Dragons content, rather than once a week or less.  Unlike others who might have ceased writing on their blog, only to come out of the darkness and announce they're going to write more (and then don't), I have been writing this whole time.  Just not here.  That will now change.

I expect to write smaller posts.  I feel very strongly that I'm not going to write about the gaming community or company.  My personal feeling at this time is that popular D&D has been ruined and destroyed beyond all redemption.  What further I might say or write on that subject would be a waste of my time and yours.

I shall, therefore, suffice with writing mundane material about rule-making, philosophy, game structure and DMing methodology.  As far as worldbuilding is concerned, I will reserving that for the closed blog (costing $3 per month through Patreon), which will go on.

I thank you for your patience in these troubled times.  I will commence writing ordinary material for this blog tomorrow.

Famine vs. Pestilence

The New Jersey Governor is saying that he's going to leave the parks open, so long as people respect distancing protocols; but if they don't respect those protocols, by god, he's going to close those parks again.

This is like saying, I'm going to leave the barn door open when I go to bed tonight, and if the horse is gone in the morning, then by god, I'm going to close that door again. I'm warning you.

Here's how famine works. If you are meant to be planting crops, and you don't, because you think you don't see any value in the work you are doing today, the day is going to come when you realize how wrong that thinking is. And now, there won't be a harvest; but at the time you realize that, you're not in trouble yet. There will still be berries to pick and herbs to forage for, and animals to hunt. You know, however, that months from now, you're going to starve. It will be slow, and it will be crippling. And it will be too late come spring to plant another crop, because by the time that crop ripens, you and your family will almost certainly be dead.

This is not how pestilence works. If you are hiding out, avoiding the plague, and you start thinking there's no value in all this avoidance you're doing, you might convince yourself it's better to go outside. But if you do that, pestilence is going to hit you like a bus. Just like that, bang. It will hit you, and you may last days, but then you'll be dead. So no matter how much you convince yourself that everything is fine, because you hid out to where you couldn't stand it any more, remember there are buses out there. There are buses everywhere.

A Short Post

A short post.  I'm working on some large projects which I hope to unveil in May.  In these strange times, I hope to come back to Earth in a better position than I was when I left, as CGP Grey describes.

It is no doubt easier to be a writer and an artist at this time than it is to be a pipe-fitter.

In the meantime, my daughter is with child and I am set to be a grandfather.  Good news all around.