of Dice and Dragons

Looking through my news feeds this morning there are many, many news articles and posts about the passing of gaming icon Gary Gygax and although I mentioned it yesterday the magnitude of this event and what he met to all of us didn’t really strike me until late last night and this morning.

While I never met him I think most would agree that he had some amount influence on all us. Through the “magic” of the games he gave us we were allowed to transform ourselves into warriors, wizards, gunslingers, galaxy hoppers and storytellers. For many it allowed us to find our place in the grand scheme of things and find new friends.

For myself I still remember that Christmas morning when I opened that first boxed set all those years ago. The fun (and aggrevation) of learning and
teaching the rules as I was the only one that owned them. The friends I’ve made over the years both online and offline who I may never have met if not for gaming. Memories of epic battles, both won and lost, characters that live on well after the campaigns have ended and places that as familiar as my home town.

I know that some struggle for a witty quote, something to sum up how they feel and to be honest the first thing that came to my mind was the chorus to Leader of the Band by Dan Fogelberg:

The leader of the band is tired
And his eyes are growing old
But his blood runs through
My instrument
And his song is in my soul –
My life has been a poor attempt
To imitate the man
I’m just a living legacy
To the leader of the band

Gary will live on in all of us for we are his legacy.

Rest well Gary, you will be missed.

I know that many of us are reading a lot about the coming of 4E between the WoTC site itself and the numerous gaming blogs that are covering it add to that growing list the folks at Slashdot.

Over at Slashdot they’ve posted the Q&A they had with them and are going to pass along the top five follow-up questions from the comments left.  The cool part of this is that they’re going to get the answers on camera and will post the video in March.

I can’t wait to be able to put faces to the names.

Slashdot | The D&D Designers Answer Your Questions

May your dice roll well.

This is the second post in my series - be sure to check out the first post Realms of Rylon - The Postmortem.

When most folks start out reviewing something they’ve done there seems to be an instinctive need to focus on those aspects that might seem negative or needing improvement so I’ve decided to start with those things that went well for the campaign.

1. Newsletter

One of the things I’ve learned throughout life is that communication seems to be one of the things we do absolutely horribly more often than not so I set out to change that a bit by introducing a newsletter for my campaign - The Rylon Reader.

The idea was simple, provide information about the campaign and some group information at the same time. The latter worked as I was not only the GM at his point but also the host for all games.

For group information I included a schedule of upcoming sessions and if we were planning a non-game night (like a BBQ which we try to do at least once a year) what the plan was including who was bringing what.

For gaming information I included a short recap of the session and any notable NPCs that they may have encountered, common knowledge the group had learned (like monsters and magic items). I used this section of the newsletter to convey information concerning the campaign prior to its actual start by including rumors, interesting locations the party may want to check out.

The newsletter was well received by the group and it is often referred to, not just for the content but as an item that everyone enjoyed getting.

2. NPCs

Most campaigns are about the combat and while there was more than a little of it in Rylon there was also a lot of interaction with the citizens of the realm which lead to a need for NPCs.

The goal was simple, add three dimensional characters to the world who had their own motivations and goals - the trick to this is thinking story and not stats. I’ve mentioned this in the past (see Build Characters not Stats) and I’m sure I’ll bring it up again in the future - don’t stat your NPCs until you need to. To make believable and memorable NPCs you need to focus on who they are, why they’re in your campaign and how they’ll interact with the party - when you figure out those items the NPC will become something more that a simple list of stats.

How do you know you’ve accomplished this? When your group continues to talk about the NPCs long after they’ve been introduced. Some of the major NPCs from Rylon are still mentioned to this day long after the campaign folded.

3. Campaign World

This is an area where most GMs (myself included on more than one occasion) fall short - the world they create looks good on paper but then the group enters it, the world maintains the same two dimensional quality that the paper has.

With Rylon I spent some significant time figuring out what was going to happen in the world before we even started. I created a backdrop for the campaign, a war. What this allowed me to do was inject world events which had a common thread and were interconnected. The fall of cities, spread of rumors, slave lords, prisoners of war, displaced communities, were all brought into the campaign and all occurred without the party’s direct interaction. It also gave me the opportunity to bring back NPCs which would normally be tied to one location but due to the city they lived in being destroyed so now could be found anywhere in the realm.

I also took the opportunity to get input from the players here and one of them came up with an entire kobold clan (he wanted to run a kobold as a PC) complete with a diagram of the underground city they lived in, major NPCs, religion and history. I consider myself fortunate for this as it gave me a lot of fertile ground to pull from and also gave birth to a dwarven city which may not have existed otherwise. The city was unlike anything the group had encountered in our previous campaigns (dwarves not being a particular favorite for PC race) so it was enjoyed by all.

The lesson here is to create new places that your group hasn’t been to. While you can create whole new cities as we did in Rylon with the kobolds and dwarves you could decide to keep things fairly simple, just chance a custom or two, the style of government or even expected laws (what do you mean no magic in city limits?).

4. Plot Lines

So, you’ve got PCs, you’ve got a campaign world, now what? That’s were plot comes into play. The plot or storyline of the campaign needs to be thought out and be loose enough to be worked with. In the case of Rylon I created a central storyline to draw from and then pulled information for subplots from the discussions during character generation and gaming sessions.

A good lesson here is that when your players start talking, starting listening (and take notes if you need to). You’ll be amazed at how much story information you can glean from a simple side conversation and the players will enjoy their gaming time that much more when they see things they’ve thought about come up in the in the course of play.

The important thing here is to make sure they are seeds - you want the party to make the choice to follow the storyline on their own and not be forced into it. Trust me on this one as I’ve made the mistake in the past, make the choice tempting enough and the party will follow, force them and soon no one wants to play the campaign anymore.

The final item I would mention about plot lines is try and make some of them character specific. Some will respond to this and others won’t but by making the effort to find story lines for specific characters those players will feel good and those that aren’t getting story lines you can speak to about working up some additional material to pull future story lines specific to their character from.

5. Notes

There is nothing that will derail an ongoing campaign faster than the, “okay where did we leave of last week?” question from the GM. This was a trap I was determined not to fall into so I started right out of the gate taking notes.

Each week I would record the session number, the real world date of the session, the campaign dates for the session and then any notes associated with the session. I learned right away the benefit of these notes. With them I had a history to work from, places the characters had been, people they had met, monsters defeated and magic collected or experienced.

The notes I took also gave me the information for my campaign newsletter which I mentioned above. I didn’t need to sit down and think about the last session to write up the summary, I can the highlights already in my notes.

For more information about note taking check out my posting, A Guide to Session Notes.

So there you have “The Good” - the list of the top things I think worked well for my campaign or that the others at the table thought were the highlights for them. In the next installment of this series I’m going to look at “The Bad” - the things that could have used a tweak or two to put them in “The Good” category.

May your dice roll well.

Be sure to check out the rest of the series:
Realms of Rylon - The Postmortem
Realms of Rylon Postmortem - The Bad
Realms of Rylon Postmortem - The Ugly