The map is perfectly serviceable. The main geographic feature of each 10-mile hex is shown by a mapping symbol. There are lakes, rivers, roads and dots for towns.

Should the players wish their characters to go exploring, I could tell you that hex 0314 contains the imposing stone-gray castle of the Earl of  Pennington Moors or that the hex 1304 holds the north end of The Hand, a large northern lake rich with perch.

(For advice on how to effectively key a hex map, I heartily recommend checking out the series of articles “How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox” from the blog Bat in the Attic.)

As useful as a hex map done with symbols can be, it’s just not evocative. A fantasy map should inspire a GM. It should lure players into the wilderness.

I wanted a handout that would feed the players’ desire to explore the ruins of Rochelle Abbey, reach the heart of the Ellenwood Forest or find the long-rumored pass through the Midlothian Mountains.

This is the first part of a short series detailing how I created my own fantasy map.

Getting inspired

Two websites proved very instructive in my journey to construct a map that does justice to my campaign.

The first was the blog Vaults of the Mad Archmage. His do-it-yourself map that expresses his vision for Castle Greyhawk should blow your socks off. It’s also a good lesson for a GM in how to take published material and make it your own. Best of all are the series of posts that take you through the map’s creation.

The other blog was Hill Cantons. He has two articles that express a similar sentiment—that rpg maps should generate ideas. They are “How to ‘Awesome Up’ Fantasy Maps” and “Top Five Fantasy RPG Maps.”

Taking elements from both, I embarked on my own DIY quest to bring the northern lands of Steffenhold to life and share that process with you.

Step 1: Selecting the paper

I selected parchment paper for this project. Nothing too fancy, just something from a tablet of paper for novice calligraphers. The page I selected had a slight yellow tint, just to give a hint of an aged document.

A good reason to use calligraphy parchment is that it works really well with ink, which will be important later. But mostly I wanted something of better quality than your standard all-purpose printer paper.

Step 2: Tracing

Because I already had the hex map, I had an excellent base from which to work. Basically, I laid the parchment atop the hex map, put both on the light table, so that I could begin the preliminary tracing.

(If you don’t have a light table, you can approximate this process by using graphite paper. In this case, you lay the graphite sheet atop the parchment, and then the hex map atop that, and redraw the features on the hex map you want imprinted on the new map. The only real disadvantage to this method is that it’s rough on the original).

At this stage, I was really only interested in placing those things — towns, ruins, roads and waterways, mainly — that would remain the same from the hex map to the decorative map. These I traced in pencil.

In the next part of this series, we’ll put pencil to paper and see what evolves.

In fact, the 5 room dungeon contest held by Roleplayingtips and Strolen back in 2007 resulted in almost 100 5 room dungeons, all of which (to the best of my knowledge) make use of a layout I like to call “The Railroad” ie: 5 rooms in a straight line.

This is the assumed layout (at least they don’t otherwise specify) used by most setups like those proposed by Johnn Four and The stew’s own Troy Taylor. That makes a lot of sense because it’s meant to be simple, straightforward, quick, and the players are meant to hit every room.  As soon as you introduce a fork in the path, there’s a chance that the PCs skip one or more of the five encounters.  Frankly though, these dungeons aren’t your magnum opus, so if a side passage is missed, the biggest issue is that you may be short a little game time. And let’s be honest: Who’s players don’t sweep the entire dungeon just in case they’ve missed something sparkly, especially if they have a half-hour in the session left to kill?  Worst case scenario, if you’re worried about it, just quantum ogre the whole run or put the key to one path at the end of another and call it a day. This effectively reduces one of the more complex layouts back to The Railroad, but no one is likely to notice if you don’t abuse the tactic. Alternately, consider designing your encounters so that all of them must be dealt with to succeed: destroying all traces of an evil group or collecting a series of McGuffins can require the exploration of every room.

The major issue then is repetitiveness, since 5 room dungeons are a quick and easy fallback plan, and there are only 9 possible layouts. Fortunately, there are several ways to keep the same nine dungeons fresh use after use.

They don’t have to be dungeons:
It’s been said elsewhere, but these can be layouts for warehouses, starships, haunted houses, or any other location, not just dungeons. But this concept can be taken further. These can be used as investigation trees, social networks, or any number of other setups.

Rooms can be shifted:
The reason the rooms are arranged in the the way they’re displayed is because I thought they made cute, funny,  or evocative pictures that way. Moving around the rooms makes no difference to the actual layout though.  If you want to move around rooms, change the order or length of passages, or other merely cosmetic changes, that doesn’t actually change the layout, but it does make it look distinct.   For example, “Foglio’s Snail” can have it’s “eyes” rotated around to make it look similar to “The Arrow”, with the entrance at the other end.  This plays the same as the snail normally would, but looks different.

Levels can be added:
Any or all of the passages can be staircases, lava tubes, elevators or other vertical transitions, creating a two-level dungeon. Again, this is merely a cosmetic change to the layout, but it helps make this week’s dungeon look distinct from last week’s.  Alternately, you can prepare two five room dungeons and use one as level one, and the other as level two if you’re feeling particularly ambitious. This doubles the amount of work you need to do, but creates roughly 405 different possible layouts.

Use different building blocks:
All of the nine basic setups are constructed with only two types of building blocks: The entryway and 4 hall + room pieces.  There’s no reason this formula can’t be changed up. Additional passages can be added. Rooms can be connected directly with no hallways between. Secret passages can act as shortcuts or create secret rooms.  Alternate passageways that make use of different modes of travel can be created.

The sixth room:
Nothing says that a sneaky GM can’t create a five room dungeon with six rooms. If you want to be super-sneaky, the sixth room can be a secret room!  An extra room adds
many more possibilities with only minimally more effort.

An example – The Cliffside Temple:
Using “The Moose” as the base, here’s a sample five-room dungeon layout. An ancient temple carved into the side of a cliff, our heroes come in search of a holy relic.  From the entry foyer they can either head to the vaulted central chamber, or climb the stairs that lead to a rising set of observation rooms that look down on the central chamber through small windows.  A relic is located in the main chamber, as are several others in the observation rooms, but these are all fakes.  The true relics are kept safe in a secret chamber that can be accessed via a secret door in the uppermost observation room. Alert PCs may be tipped off to the existence of this secret room since it too overlooks the main chamber.

The Thoughts In My Head
I started this campaign with a bright and shiny idea. Ideas are ALWAYS bright and shiny. Taking them out and using them dulls the shine a bit and changes the nature of the idea. What starts as the most beautiful campaign you will ever run changes as you actually run it. In my game, things have veered from the original concept, and I’ve chosen to roll with that rather than try to drag things back to the track. We’ve been through 2 different “acts” in the overarching campaign and we are now approaching the final act where the group’s actions determine the fate of the city that they are protecting.

I want this last act to be short, sweet, and have a great memorable ending. To that end, I’m throwing in a lot of preparation on the front end and making sure I’m ready to run it. I’ve also built myself an outline of the steps I need to take to make sure it is exciting for the finale.

• Assess/Buy In – An important part of recapturing excitement is knowing what issues there are in the game and ensuring that the players are buying into what you’re selling. I’m planning to tell the players that I plan to end the game and how I plan to end it. I’ll be doing a 2 to 3 session finale, letting them know that this is the crux of everything they’ve worked up to. I’ll use this opportunity to ask them what they want to see in the ending.Finding out what the players want, and ensuring that they know how the ending will play out (at least in the general sense) will clear away some of the issues that can come up during a game. Players will be more ready to jump on clues and tackle issues head on, knowing that they don’t have much time and if it is coming up now it is likely important, not a hook for something in the future.
• Buildup – A big part of excitement is anticipation. Knowing that something big is coming will make people want it to come all the more. I’ll be taking a week’s break from my game, and calling players in that time to work out individual goals and build their excitement up individually. We’ll do small roleplaying sessions over the phone for character development and to make sure none of their side stories or goals are missed. There will also be down time in-game so that their various plans can come together and flow into the epic finale.
• Draw Attention To Focal Points – If all goes as planned, I’ll have a group of players at the table ready to go and excited. I’m going to try to have stuff for them to focus their attention on. Since there are a lot of NPCs involved, I’m going to take the NPC cards I printed and put them up so everyone knows who all is involved. I’ll also be making big use of maps and minis. Anything I can think of between now and then to give them something to focus on and keep them in the mindset of the final 2 sessions. Since one part of the big final scene is going to be a banquet held in their honor, I’ll be trying to decorate the gaming room as banquet hall like as possible.
• Engage – All of the points previous to this one are to draw the players in and get them ready for something exciting, now it’s time to give that to them. I’ll be working on engaging the players from the get-go and have them involved in things going on. Making sure that they know they are part of the action and a motivating force is going to be essential. Players will tell stories of how they talked their way past “whatever his name was noble”, not that Duke Terencillus had set up all sorts of plans to stop them. I’ll definitely be focusing on the players and their actions.
• Reward – Finally, excitement requires denouement to feel tangible. The resolution after the climax. This is what gets the people talking. I’m planning to really play up the end scene and allow for their victory (or defeat if they really screw it up) to shine. I’m also planning to give the players time to narrate the “credits” showing what occurred with their characters after the story. This will let people get the resolution to the character’s’ stories that we won ’t have time to play out. This will be done in front of the other players, because everyone wants an audience.

That’s my plan for recapturing the excitement for the finale of my game. Every game waxes and wanes. Sometimes you just need to roll with it and have the best time possible that evening. Sometimes, though, you need to give it a 110% and try to light a new spark, even if that is just so you go out with a bang. When your games slow down, what do you do to rekindle the excitement?

Sometimes I think the Stew comes off as a more polished operation than it really is. Not in the sense that we don’t put time and energy into producing polished content, because we do. But we started out as a bunch of GMs who love GMing and wanted to write about it and hopefully help other GMs love it as much as we do, and that’s still what we are, and what Gnome Stew is about.

I didn’t know if this site would work, though after two years of running my first GMing blog, Treasure Tables, I had a hunch that it would. It has worked, in my opinion: We’ve had over 1.3 million visitors since 2008. Million. I’ve never had a million people engage with anything else I’ve ever been a part of; it’s humbling.

If you’re here, now, reading this: Thank you. I’ve been saying you rock for the past four years, and you still rock. You’ll have to hear it for the next four years, too. Thank you.

Stats? Fuck ‘em.

For the past seven State of the Stew articles, I’ve crunched and shared site stats that I suspect only me and a handful of other people actually cared about. And that’s fine; I shared them for me, and no one else was obligated to care.

Last year, though, we hit a plateau. A few stats went up, a few stayed about the same, and some of them went down. It was depressing, despite the fact that our overall numbers were still enviable for a niche blog within a niche hobby. I did some soul-searching. A lot of email went back and forth on our internal mailing list; we had conference calls and set goals and started a calendar and did all sorts of other stuff behind the scenes. I considered stepping down as site admin and quitting blogging.

Several folks pointed out that we, the gnomes, should just keep doing our thing and not worry too much about stats. And they were right.

We write the articles that we do, the ways that we do, because we want to. We’re thrilled that thousands of readers feel the same way about what this blog is and should be as we do. Those who’d prefer Gnome Stew to be a different kind of blog, to broaden our focus beyond GMing, or to go with the flow have hundreds of alternatives to choose from, and we wish them well.

So: Not worrying about the numbers. But milestones? Hell, yeah:

• The Stew crossed 1,000 articles (now closing in on 1,200)
• We won our second silver ENnie Award for Best Blog (thank you!)
• The gnomes published our second book, Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game
• The site was a finalist in the 2012 RPG Site of the Year awards (thank you!)
• We launched our Google+ page and have around 900 folks circling us there
• Responding to reader feedback, we made “More meat, less meta” our 2012 mantra, and have delivered dozens of practical-not-theoretical articles since January
• Bob Everson joined the team as our proofreader
• We started accepting guest articles, and have run some great ones (see them all)
• We implemented some new technical stuff, like comment editing and the ability to log in using accounts you already have
• We launched our mailing list

If I’m forgetting anything (and I probably am), I apologize.

So that was year four, May 2011-May 2012. It was a good year. Enough looking back, though. Or if you prefer: Fuck it, let’s go bowling get back to talking about GMing. Thanks for reading.

A Gradual Falling Out

Published adventures, or Modules as we called them when I was just a fledgling GM, are complete stories for a given game that are meant to be run in one or more sessions. I did not jump behind the screen, day one, running my own stuff, I ran lots of modules when I first started in the hobby, and in many ways I can’t imagine how I would have started as GM without them. Over time though, I have been less interested in published adventures and far more interested in writing my own.

Note– I have a number of friends in the industry who write published adventures. Don’t take these reasons personally…

The Reasons

So why don’t I run modules? There are a few reasons. You may or may not agree with them all, or any, but here is what I think.

Modules Are Written For Everyone

I know my gaming group, the writer of an adventure does not. So when that writer writes, in most cases they are writing for some generic group, and have to make assumptions about that group along the way. That’s not the writers fault, that is how the writer has to work. Because of that, the writer cannot take advantage of things about my group or your group, and they must drive the story along without directly hooking into the player’s backgrounds and motivations, etc.

The end result is that the module is not personal for the group playing it. In many cases its a location based event (e.g. Dungeon) or it’s a mission based story where some external force drives the character’s motivation (e.g. Quest, Top Secret Mission, Contract, etc). That in itself is not bad, but playing only those kinds of adventures can be dry over time.

When I write my sessions, I make the motivations for the adventure personal. I look at the backgrounds of the characters, I look at the NPC’s they have encountered, and I come up with a personal reason why they want to be involved. That personal tie in generates an emotional connection with the players and enhances everyone’s intensity when playing.

Modules Do Not Make You A Better Storyteller

Published adventures do not expand your abilities to write adventures. They are a nice source of ideas and can even help with understanding what elements need to go into writing your own session, but they do nothing about making you a better storyteller. When the whole plot of an adventure is thought out for you, your imagination has to do very little to run it. Read the text boxes, follow the notes for what to do, etc.

When you write your own adventures, you exercise your creativity, imagination, and writing skills. You need to think of a structured plot, create engaging NPC’s, create motivation, description, etc. All of these things make up a good storyteller. The only way these things improve is through practice. Every adventure your write is a step on the path to making you a better storyteller.

Modules Are An Added Cost

My imagination is free. Modules are not. There is a reason why big companies make modules, it’s a revenue stream. In order to keep money coming in after a company sells the core rules, they have to start selling adventures (or supplements, but that is for a different day…). The bottom line is that after putting out the money for the core books, you are then spending additional money for the adventures you are going to run.

I have had my own financial up’s and down’s over the years, and I am not always keen on spending additional money on adventures. One of the things I like about this hobby is that when I want to, I can keep spending down to a minimum. I don’t need to buy mini’s, map packs, or modules; I can take the core book and my imagination and play.

Some will argue that time is money. I agree. That time spent writing is part of what I love about being a GM, so that is not lost time for me – that is part of working on my hobby.

Why Not Hack Them?

Sure. You can take a module, read it, then start hacking it to make the motivations personal, swap out the NPC’s for ones the PC’s know, change the location, etc. That is all work, and in some cases you are spending as much time hacking the module and keeping the continuity, as you would writing something from scratch.

Full Disclosure — Where I Contradict Myself (a little)

There are always exceptions. There are times when published material can be better than the things you write. In my thirty years of gaming, I have one shining example of where I prefer published material over my own.

Paranoia. Back in the 1st edition days, the published adventures from West End Games (and later ported over to Paranoia XP) were some of the funniest adventures I have ever run. I don’t think as a GM then, and perhaps even now, that I could quite capture the insanity of adventures like: “Send In The Clones”, “Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues,” and my favorite “Me and My Shadow, Mark IV” (from the Acute Paranoia Supplement).

To Write or Run, That Is The Question

I don’t hate published adventures. It’s just not my preference to use them in my day to day gaming. For me, part of being a GM is being the creator of stories; to come up with the plots, the NPC’s and locations. Using a module takes that away from me, and leaves me with only the running of the game (which is my other favorite part of being a GM).

The choice of using published adventures or not is personal to each GM and based on their time, finances, skill as a storyteller, experience as a GM,etc. There is nothing wrong with using them. It is not a sign of GM weakness, any more than not using them is a sign of being a “better GM”.

What about you? Do you like published adventures? Dislike them? Do you use them often, sometimes, never? What are some of your favorites?

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Every now and then, we’ll share something with you that we think you’ll be interested in — like the opening of preorders for our next book, Phil Vecchione’s Never Unprepared, or if a meteor is about to strike the Earth. Things like that.

We think this will help us stay connected with occasional as well as regular readers, and if that sounds good to you I hope you’ll consider signing up. And you could win cool stuff!

Win cool gaming stuff

We can’t go five minutes without having a giveaway of some sort, and this is no exception! Here’s the lowdown:

• To be eligible to win, you need to subscribe to our mailing list and be a current subscriber as of May 24, 2012, at whatever time I get a chance to randomly select the winners.
• Winners will be chosen randomly from all mailing list subscribers. (Members of the Gnome Stew team aren’t eligible, of course.) Every subscriber is eligible to win one prize.
• We want folks to spread the word, so we’ve set thresholds for unlocking new prizes depending on how many readers sign up (see below). The more subscribers we get, the more stuff we’ll give away.

The prizes

We’re giving away the following, with more prizes given away the more subscribers we get:

1. Grand Prize: A $75 gift certificate to DriveThruRPG and PDF copies of our first two books, Eureka and Masks (a $26.95 value)!
2. Second Prize (unlocked at 100 subscribers): A $35 gift certificate to DriveThruRPG and PDF copies of our first two books, Eureka and Masks (a $26.95 value)!
3. Third Prize (unlocked at 250 subscribers): A $20 gift certificate to DriveThruRPG and PDF copies of our first two books, Eureka and Masks (a $26.95 value)!
4. More Prizes (unlocked at 500 subscribers): We’ll give away three more sets of our first two books, Eureka and Masks, in PDF (each a $26.95 value)!
5. Still More Prizes (unlocked at 750 subscribers): We’ll give away another SIX sets of our first two books, Eureka and Masks, in PDF (each a $26.95 value)!
6. OMG Yet More Prizes (unlocked at 1,000 subscribers): We’ll give away ANOTHER NINE sets of our first two books, Eureka and Masks, in PDF (each a $26.95 value)!

In other words, if a thousand people subscribe to our mailing list, we’ll be giving away $130 in gift certificates and over $550 worth of Engine Publishing books — and you’d have a total of 21 chances to win a prize.

Thanks for reading, I hope you’ll sign up, and here’s the mailing list signup page one more time. Good luck!

No matter what game you play, a constant is characters. Players have characters that they can lavish attention and development on, while the GM often has numerous characters, great and small, to juggle. Whether you’re new to roleplaying, an experienced GM creating a monster who gets a few lines and expresses personality before the hacking begins, a player looking for tricks to get inside her character’s head, or anyone else looking to add some pizazz to their humble fighter, I have some tricks to share.

Two Techniques

Way back in 2009, I wrote a few articles for a series titled Deep as a Puddle, with advice and techniques for building a quick character–PC or NPC. Let’s try out two techniques and see if they’re still useful.

First, we need a setting for our characters to inhabit. While Star Wars offers a well known setting, Elizabeth Bear’s Range of Ghosts is still on my mind. Let’s use the tools to create characters that fit that world well.

Characters and Culture

We’ll start with Characters and Culture. The fantasy world is centered on a post-Genghis Khan Central Asia, with Temur’s people strongly based on the mongols. Let’s build cultural rules, inspired by his people. (If you’re familiar with the books, I’d be curious to hear which traits you’d switch out.)

2: Is an excellent horseman
3: Tremendous endurance, can ride for days
4: Bold leadership is expected and required
5: Loves wide open spaces
6: Other cultures exist to provide tribute
7: Blood ties are key
8: Frequent skirmishes and rivalry between clans
9: Peerless archers
10: The dead are given to sky, vultures are respected
J: The empire is vast, leading to familiarity with many cultures
Q: Women control the house, men the herd
K: The Khan’s seed is widely sown

Now that we know what the culture as a whole values (or what rules it obeys), we’ll draw a card for each character. The value tells us which trait is at the character’s center; the suit tells us how the character interacts with the rule.

Hearts: The character embodies, enacts, or enforces the rule.
Diamonds: The character twists, alters, or avoids the rule.
Spades: The character’s life is altered (for good or bad) by the rule.
Clubs: The character breaks the rule.

For names throughout, I’m going to raid the Story Games Name Project‘s Mongolian Names page. Let’s draw!

Khidyr Arbis: 10 of Clubs. Khidyr is a renowned bandit, a leader of a group of desperate outlaws. His attacks are known for his strange practice of building cairns over his fallen foes. While his companions assume that he’s been influenced by foreign priests, or cynically muse that his cruelty extends into tormenting his victims by denying them a return to mother sky, he was actually traumatized by a vicious vulture in his youth, leaving him with an abiding loathing of carrion birds.

Puntsagiyn Dashyondon: 7 of Diamonds. Puntsagiyn rides at the right hand of Khidyr, living a bandit’s life, despite her family’s wealth and power. Her father’s dispute with his brothers kept him distracted while Puntsagiyn drifted into Khidyr’s camp. She is a woman divided, using her influence to steer Khidyr away from conflict with her clan–and against the more lucrative trade of the Celadon Highway .

Minghan Tserendjav: 5 of Spades: Minghan comes from a line more likely to organize a caravan than to strike at it. In Minghan, however, steppe blood flows thickly–he finds the confines of a city dismaying. He fell in with Khidyr after fleeing to the great steppe; it is his advice that keeps the bandits roaming instead of taking over a village or fortifying a stronghold to store their ill-gotten loot.

So, that’s the first technique. It does a good job of establishing a cultural baseline–you can brief your players on a culture in 12 quick bullet points. It helps ensure that characters relate to their culture, rather than having perfectly formed 21st century viewpoints…

On to testing: Myers Briggs

We all have different approaches to interacting with the world, often based on an innate understanding and bias. One test that tries to classify how we see and approach the world is Myers Briggs. Those broad categories can be adapted to roleplaying, as Deep as a Puddle: Myers Briggs addressed.

Let’s take our group of bandits and add Eiji Ochirbat to the mix. We’ll roll on the quick table from the article… a 15. That’s ENFP – The Inspirers. Clicking on careers for each personality type, then ENFP in specific, gives several traits. The following sparked when I read them: Warmly, genuinely interested in people; Dislike performing routine tasks, Need approval and appreciation from others, Well-developed verbal and written communication skills.

Eiji Ochirbat is the group’s counselor; the glue that holds the band together. Eiji is a former smith, a highly respected position within Temur’s people. He couldn’t stand the tedium of forging iron; five years ago he rode out to “gather ore” while the warriors were out raiding, and never returned. That began a lone and hungry time; he never imagined leaving his people and joining bandits.

Khidyr piqued his interest, asking the smith about captured texts. Together, they reviewed the captured documents and discovered the pattern and timing of the next caravans. Eiji joined the bandits; at first as a kind of mascot, but his warm and friendly manner made friends. Eiji evaluates new arrivals and advises Puntsagiyn on their fit–often spotting loners who can’t conform to even bandit society. Many brigands have found themselves cast out after crossing Eiji–or someone Eiji cares for.

Building Your World

Have you used the Culture Builder or the Myers Briggs assessment to guide character development? As a player, giving your character a different fundamental view/approach to the world can create a vivid character. (For example, if you value concrete and perceptible facts [sensing], create a character who lives in the world of theory and the abstract [intuition].)

As a GM, defining cultures by Mo’s Simon Says post gives you a concrete tool to set cultural expectations–and create characters who embrace and break those expectations. That can provide players with valuable guidelines when they’re creating characters to match–or turn their backs on–their culture. Plus it’s great for quickly generating NPCs who reflect the culture–for good and bad.

What techniques do you use to add more depth to your characters, whether PC or NPC?

For the most part, players love options. As RPGs have advanced, there are some that do their best to give players every possible option for creating their characters. So many, in fact, that some options are hardly ever used. I’m a D&D and Pathfinder guy myself, so for me the examples that jump to mind first are skills like Handle Animal, Profession, and Craft.

4th Edition famously decided skills had gone too far and cut these options out. Pathfinder has continued the tradition of these skills, but I rarely find a player who takes them, except as a conscious decision to add “fluff” to their characters (the one exception being Profession: Sailor in aquatic games.)

Today, however, I’d like to stand up for these skills and character choices. If used correctly, these skills can go a long way towards making your character unique and helpful, and not in a “fluffy” kind of way. In fact, they can be complete game-changers if used right.

While I’ve used D&D skills as the baseline in this article, my advice isn’t limited to D&D. Just substitute your chosen game’s versions of these skills and you’ll be all set.

Like all aspect of the game, these skills will fly or fail depending on how the players, GM, and campaign implement them.

The Players

Many players refuse to take these “fluff” skills because they fear they’ll never be used. Why waste skill points on Profession: (Botany) when you could take Perception? But the problem with that sort of thinking is it places all the blame on the GM when you’re the one making the character. I know we all don’t want to become THAT guy: the bard who stops at every inn to get use out of his Perform skill while the rest of the party sits and watches. But there are other, less annoying ways to use these skills.

1. Pick a profession you can use on the road. For example, take Profession (Brewer), get a wagon and some brewing equipment, and suddenly you’re making your profession check every time you travel. Not only do you get a nice, steady source of income, but you’d be surprised how many situations can be solved by getting people drunk and starting alcohol fires.

2. Planning on using followers? Craft Weapon, Craft Armor, and a few silver coins a day to pay for assistants, and suddenly you’re equipping your 40+ men for half the cost. That’s quite a lot of money when you’re building an army.

3. Use Handle Animal in place of an animal companion. It has the benefit of not limiting you in type or number of animals and doesn’t penalize you for their death. Need to disarm some traps? Send a herd of sheep through the area. Need to distract a crowd? Trained mice will do the trick, and trained monkeys might even steal some jewelery for you. Yes you have to raise it from childhood, but who’s going to mess with you when you’ve got a pet T-Rex?

4. If you’re planning on outdoor combat, Profession (Driver) can be a lot of fun. If someone takes Craft (Seige Weapons) or Craft (Wagons) and builds you a nice armored vehicle, you can drive your party in circles and shoot arrows and spells at your enemies while always remaining out of melee range.

5. Take Craft (Siege Weapons) and Profession (Builder). Get them up high enough and whenever you have a day to prepare either to attack or defend, you can chop down a few trees and make yourself defences and a catapult to help yourself out.

Because these skills are so loosely defined, there are all sorts of creative ways you can change up the game just by taking them. Killing the enemy with a sword is memorable. Impersonating his servant with a Profession (Butler) check and poisoning his drink is priceless…

The GM

There’s a concept in storytelling that applies to RPGs as well called Chekov’s gun. It’s the idea that if you want to shoot someone in Act 3, you have to hang the gun on the mantlepiece in Act 1, and if you hang a gun on the mantlepiece in Act 1, then you should probably shoot someone in Act 3.

What this means for GMs is if your players take an obscure skill, you should build them encounters that use it.

I knew a guy who once gave a character Knowledge: (Famous Bigots). It was a joke on his part, a fluffy waste of skill he never thought he’d use. Imagine his surprise when the GM started introducing racist antagonists and began asking him to make famous bigot checks.

Many people won’t take a class with trapfinding unless they believe there will be traps, and if they take trapfinding it’s because they hope to use it sometime. Likewise, many players won’t bother with a wide variety of skills unless you give them a chance to use them.

Did someone take Profession (Cook)? Maybe the castle they’re infiltrating is in need of a chef. They could pay the bandits at the toll bridge, or if they have a PC with Craft (Boats), make a raft and avoid them altogether. Few things make a player feel special like getting to use that skill only he possesses. Heck, maybe the hook that gets them started on that inter-planar adventure you were working on was just someone was in need of a carpenter.

The Campaign

Since deciding to write this article, I’ve thought about how you could base a campaign around little-used skills. As long as the players understand the premise beforehand, I can see a lot of fun coming out of these concepts:

1. Instead of simply guarding a caravan, the PCs will RUN a caravan. They still travel around rescuing innocents, clearing dungeons, and the like, but a large part of their income will be made by trading and carrying goods. The PCs must hire experts or take the proper profession skills in order to care for the animals, repair the wagons, drive through rough terrain, or sell goods at a profit. All that travel time will likewise be great for crafting items to sell in town.

2. The PCs are all in the military, or will eventually gain control of their own private army. Profession (soldier) checks will be used frequently to train new recruits, keep order in camp, and to determine rank and promotion.

3. In a game featuring lots of caves and underground locations, Profession (Miner) checks can be used to dig through soft spots in rock walls, clear cave-ins, and extract rare metals from the stone.

4. In a game that features lots of infiltration and spying on nobles and merchants, players with skills such as Profession (Cook), Profession (Butler) and Profession (Tailor) will find themselves getting into places the average PC will not. Provided they can perform the office well enough to get hired, of course.

Based on all of the above, I hope you can see the potential in these often-overlooked skills. With players, GM, and campaign all on the same page, they can be a lot of fun for everyone involved.

This is a companion piece to my previous article, A “Realistic Enough for Fantasy” Calendar, but it also stands on its own. If you want to combine a fantasy calendar with randomly generated weather, you may enjoy them both.

For my Bleakstone hex crawl, weather and the calendar became connected when I ran across the idea of pre-generating a year’s worth of random weather in advance. That post, which is fantastic, included enough Excel code in the comments to get me rolling.

This sounded like a slick way to handle weather and a fun way to spend a few hours, so I ordered a copy of Dragon Magazine #137, grabbed my GameScience dice for that old-school feel, made some weather. (Dragon 137 isn’t expensive — I paid $7 for my copy on Amazon, including shipping. It was worth it.)

Download my Excel calendar

If you just want the payoff, here it is: Download the Bleakstone calendar with a year of random weather (Excel). In Dragon 137 terms, Bleakstone is a warm and rainy coastal climate (like much of Western Europe), and I treated the whole 27,000 square mile starting map as one zone rather than making weather for the hills, the forests, etc. Unless that’s a perfect fit for your game, you’ll probably want the naked calendar instead: Download the Bleakstone calendar without weather (Excel). I hope it’s useful to you!

Why a year?

I wanted a year of semi-realistic weather so that I wouldn’t ignore weather but also wouldn’t be tempted to exert agency through it. I wanted it to be like random encounters: My creativity goes into the process up front, and what happens in play depends on the dice. But there are a few too many die rolls involved to do it day-by-day during play, and having a year of weather means the PCs can start play in any month; those factors clinched it for me.

It took me about 20 minutes per month at first, and I was down to 10 minutes a month by the end — call it three hours overall.

Calendar elements

There are lots of options out there for generating weather for fantasy games, many of which I quite liked. But a lot of them — like the one in the excellent AD&D 1e Wilderness Survival Guide, or this excellent Greyhawk calendar with weather for the Pale — went into too much detail for my tastes. If I ever need to know or care how many inches of snow were dropped by a storm, I’ll assess the situation and roll a die. Ditto with wind direction and a host of other stuff that didn’t seem too likely to come up, or which, should it come up, would be easy enough to sort out on the fly.

What I did care about, though, was making the weather “realistic enough for fantasy,” like my calendar, and having enough details that I could accurately assess how it would impact the PCs and be able to describe it in an evocative way to enhance immersion.

The Dragon 137 article is perfect for that level of detail. It succinctly explains how to figure out the climate in your selected region, what that climate is like, and how to generate weather for it. I pretty much followed the article and everything went well. I did select some elements to worry about and ignore others, though, and that process might be useful to hear about.

I chose to generate the following:

• Average daily temperature
• Precipitation
• Wind strength
• Cloud cover

Knowing the average temperature, I can add or subtract 10 degrees and get a “good enough” number for the hottest part of the day and the coldest part of the night, if it matters. Precipitation will matter a lot for a hex crawl, so that was an obvious element to include. Wind strength is mostly for flavor unless it’s extreme, and cloud cover is almost entirely flavor. But that flavor is important because, I hope, it will help Bleakstone feel more real.

I also elected to treat all of the Bleakstone starting map — 27,000 square miles, about 10% larger than West Virginia — as a single zone for climate purposes. By the book (well, magazine), I should have created separate weather charts for different types of terrain. That’s way too much work when I can just say that the weather on the calendar is the weather wherever the PCs are, and ad lib as needed.

Rolling the bones

I won’t go into what the article covers here; it’s too long and well worth a few bucks to buy your own copy. Instead I’ll go into the shortcuts I took and things I added to the process. (This part won’t make much sense without referencing the article and my Excel calendar.) The code below either came straight from or started with code in the comments on the post I linked to earlier.

The biggest shortcut I took was using Excel’s RANDBETWEEN function to generate random number from 1-100 to determine whether there was precipitation on a given day. Like so:

Put that in a cell next to the calendar, copy and paste it next to the other 29 days of the month, and you know if there’s rain/snow. For a warm and rainy climate, it’s a flat 40% chance per day year-round. Some of the other climates are a bit more hinky, with seasonal variations.

I’m not an Excel expert, and I couldn’t figure out how to use it to accurately randomize daily temperature for this climate. For warm and rainy, there’s a seasonal high, a seasonal low, and a 50/50 chance it will fall into one of two broad middle bands. That seemed to be one too many for Excel’s IF function, so I squished the middle bands into one result and used nested IF functions to generate temperatures.

Here’s an example using winter in Bleakstone, which per the article should include four temperature options based on a d100 roll: 1-5 = 10 F, 6-50 = 25-32 F, 51-95 = 33-45 F, 96-100 = 50 F. I couldn’t make that fourth element work, so I narrowed it down to three options: 1-5 = 10 F, 6-95 = 25-45 F, 96-100 = 50 F. That worked for me, and looked like this in Excel:

For everything else, I couldn’t be arsed to try and figure out the Excel code to make the rolls for me — and I wanted to roll my dice. So I did, and it was fun.

Per the Dragon article, wind and clouds are both contingent on precipitation. I wanted a few windy and/or cloudy days without rain/snow, so I added two small steps to my rolling process for each month:

• Roll d3 for the number of windy days without precipitation, d8 for wind speed on those days, and d30 to determine the day(s)
• Roll d3 for the number of cloudy days without precipitation, d3 for cloud type, and d30 to determine the day(s)

That fit how I envisioned Bleakstone in my head: kind of like Britain, often grey and overcast, with a foggy, haunted moor at its heart.

Massage as necessary

Once I had a full year of weather, I went through my calendar and looked for obvious problems and things that needed a bit of alteration to make sense:

• Winter days above freezing with snowfall. That’s not impossible, but it shouldn’t be too common.
• Days with incredibly bad weather alternating with clear, cloudless days. I usually just clumped the bad weather.
• Bad weather not preceded by a cloudy day. I added random cloud cover to the day before most storms.
• Weird patterns like 30/40/30/50/30/50 for temperature. I changed the numbers that didn’t make sense.
• Transitions between seasons. Because seasons use different random tables for their weather in this climate, sometimes there would be jarring temperature changes from day 30 of one month to day 1 of the next.
• Anything else that looked off. I didn’t “fix” things like horribly inconvenient week-long storms, but if something looked patently unrealistic I tweaked it.

And that’s it! This was a surprisngly relaxing way to spend three hours, and I like how it turned out. Rolling dice was fun, I got to enjoy using a print issue of Dragon (man, do I miss Dragon being in print!), and I wound up with a nifty tool that should prove useful in my hex crawl.

If you’re inspired to try this, or if you tweak the system (or use a completely different system), I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

The cover

Our cover artist, Matt Morrow, supported by our art director, John Arcadian, and our graphic designer, Darren Hardy, did an amazing job on this puppy:

What I love about this cover is that the central figure looks like an interesting character to play, or to meet in the game. Whatever she’s preparing for, it looks dangerous — and fun.

She’s also more than just a pair of big boobs, which is important. I could talk all day about gender and racial inclusivity in our books, especially this one, but suffice to say that it’s an issue that bugs the shit out of me and this team has done an awesome job of ensuring that Never Unprepared’s artwork bucks the trend.

You’ll also find this same theme — preparation in all its forms — in the interior artwork by Matt Morrow and Christopher Reach. I’ll share some of those pieces later this month.

Foreword by Sean Patrick Fannon

You may know Sean Patrick Fannon as the creator of Shaintar, the author of The Fantasy Roleplaying Gamer’s Bible, as the man behind OneBookShelf (best known for DriveThruRPG and RPGNow), his love of Savage Worlds, or his sprawling convention games. Sean is awesome, and Phil and I were ecstatic when he signed on to write the foreword for Never Unprepared.

Here’s an excerpt from his foreword — one that does double duty as a great summary of what the book is about, and what makes it unique, summed up as only Sean can:

Phil, on the other hand, has taken his expertise as a project manager and his genetic predisposition to nigh-obsessive preparedness and applied these qualities to an entirely systemic and effective treatise on the matter. He’s broken down the whole of the concept, applied a step-by-step presentation of all of the factors you need to consider, and presented it all in a clear, concise, easily grasped way.

Most importantly, he’s demystified the whole concept of “game prep.” It’s no longer the boogie-man waiting at your desk a couple of hours before game time, ready to stress you out beyond measure before people start showing up for your game. It’s also no longer that arduous, tedious task you have to force yourself to close the latest MMORPG or YouTube video to drudge through during the week. It’s a reasonable, manageable task that will actually be fun to perform, and it will take a lot of stress off of you by the time that first player arrives.

The best part of this book is that Phil doesn’t just lay out a list of steps that every GM must follow to the letter. Honestly, that would be fairly useless as well as pretentious. A wiser man, Phil, in that he instead guides you in evaluating your needs as a GM, based on your style of play. From there, he helps you figure out the steps that make the most sense for you.

Without beating you over the head with them, we’ll be doing a couple more previews of Never Unprepared this month. Stay tuned!

Here’s the feedback:

“Gnome Stew is the daddy. A powerhouse of a site with articles from the A-List of role-playing bloggers. So why is it not in 1st place on my list?

Because I feel that it has lost its way a little, and that’s a crying shame. Other, fresher blogs are being punchier and more relevent, and Gnome Stew really needs to up its game to stay at the top of the pile. That’s a testament to Gnome Stew itself though – it is the site which many others have aspired to be, and now it has to raise the bar even higher.”

I don’t know what to make of it, so I’m putting the question to you, our readers: What do you make of it?

I care about being on the right track for us, the authors, and for you, our readers, not for the SOTY judges. But I want the site to be as useful to as many GMs as it can, and that has meant and will continue to mean changing course from time to time.

Atmosphere Is Your Helper

Once in college, in upstate New York, we watched the movie Alive in our dorm room, with all the windows open in January. It was stupid, and I just avoided getting frostbite, but it created a real connection to the story. I did not have to imagine how cold it was for those survivors; I was freezing right along with them.

A challenge that many GM’s have is to reach that point in running a game when everyone stops thinking about themselves as the players, and instead they slip into their characters. The GM, as the main conduit of conveying the world, has the challenge of drawing the players into the world with words alone. By creating an atmosphere in the area you are playing which is in tune with the game you are running, you help to draw your players deeper into the game world.

The first thing we need to understand is the tone or mood you are looking to create. What is the mood of your game, in general? What is the mood of this specific adventure? Of this specific scene? Those questions can have different answers, and its important when you are setting the mood to make sure you know which question you are answering.

Plenty Of Ways To Set The Mood

When setting the mood, you want to do things that appeal to one or more of the senses for you and your players. Here are some suggestions for each of the senses:

• Sight: lighting, clothing, art, pictures/images
• Sound: music, sound effects
• Smells: candles, musty books
• Taste: foods, beverages
• Touch: clothing, props

When you pick something to help you set the mood, you want something that is more subtle than overt. If you are playing music, you want it to be softer than your voice, so that when you speak your players hear you, and when you are not talking the music fills the room. If you are dimming lights, you want them dim enough to convey darkness, but not so dark that people cannot see their character sheets.

I am hardly the first person to cover this topic, and so I want to avoid some of the more thought out and understood topics such as lighting, music, and food. There are plenty of great articles that cover those. I would rather share two ways that I think are a bit different, and that I have used to set the atmosphere of some of the games I have run.

Dressing The Part

For the most part, I am not really a GM that uses many props. One thing that I have done is to use clothing to help convey the mood. I did not dress in a costume as a specific NPC, but rather I dressed up in a way to convey the tone of the game.

The first time I did this was about 10 years ago, for a d20 Modern campaign I was running called Heist. It was a darker version of Ocean’s Eleven, also set in Vegas. During the early part of the campaign, we decided to dress up like two-bit criminals, but not necessarily our characters. Here is what that looked like.

It really did help set the tone for the campaign. When we were hanging out in those clothes it was easy to imagine all of us as these low-level criminals.

This past week, I did that again for my new Corporation game. I wanted to kick off the campaign with a bang. I wanted something that gave the game more of a corporate feel. So rather than GMing in my hoodie, I wore a shirt and tie to the game.

It should be noted, that for my real world job, I never have to wear a tie. 

I don’t know what effect it had on the players, but wearing a shirt and tie helped to keep the overall tone set in my mind. I liked it enough that I think I will keep doing it.

Field Trip

Another way to set the tone of a game is to run it in a location that has the right atmosphere. Being somewhere different from your normal gaming space creates a very different gaming experience, as the players are surrounded with various inputs from their new surroundings.

Back in the late 90′s I ran a Vampire: The Masquerade campaign. I kicked off the campaign by holding the first session in downtown Buffalo, at a coffee house on a Friday night. We were very low key, sitting in a circle of worn mismatched chairs by the window, and playing diceless; we looked like some goth book club if anything. Sitting there on a busy Friday night, watching people walk up and down the street and come in and out of the shop, gave the players a feel for what downtown was like. It helped them imagine what being a Vampire in this city would be like. It was a much different experience than the suburban living room where the majority of the campaign would be played.

Soaking It In

Creating the right atmosphere for your game can be a useful tool in creating a great campaign, but it has limits. If overdone, it can be disruptive or silly, but when it is done right it can enhance your game and create great sessions.

There are so many ways to set the mood, and this article just scrapes the surface. What are some of the ways you have set the mood in your game? What is the biggest or most extreme thing you have done to set the mood, and how did it turn out?

Concept
curse the darkness is a perfect example of the current generation of independent games. The mechanics are unique, the scope of the game is built around a set theme, and the jump in and play factor is incredibly quick. It also focuses on moral choices and personal decisions much more than stats on a sheet. This is a game you’ll grab for the story and the feel of it. One thing about a lot of independent games that I both like and dislike is the one-shot feel of them. While many games in this genre can be played over long campaigns, I often find the novelty of the game gone after one setting. curse the darkness doesn’t do that to me. It is perfectly capable of being played as a one-shot game and feeling complete, but it has the potential to be played over a longer campaign and not feel like you’ve already done everything there is to do.

Setting

The setting of the game is post-apocalyptic, but just a few years after the apocalypse occurs in 2012. It’s not a fiery apocalypse, but it destroys the world. All over the world at religious sites, government sites, and sites of financial power, buildings collapse, taking away the biggest forms of control. Soon, shadows open up and swallow more things, including the city of Jerusalem. A voice is heard declaring that there will be no more ideology, religion, politics, or racism. The only rule is that everyone takes care of everyone, and if you mess up, the creatures in the shadows (the Between) will take you too.

Your characters are living in this brave new world. Nobody knows who the voice is, but everyone is scared of breaking the rules and being drug into the shadows. Some people have learned how to move into the shadows themselves, and they can travel through the Between to any other point in the world if they know their destination. Things are in disarray, and some places are better than others. The creatures in the Between don’t attack people carrying supplies through the Between or following the rule of “care for everyone”, but they will pop out and attack people that are perceived to be breaking the rules.

Mechanics

The mechanics of curse the darkness are pretty unique. Action resolution is not done with dice or rolling, but by using a deck of cards and a number of cards of a particular suit that correspond to a players attribute. But let’s start with character creation to give you a more complete grasp on things.

Character Creation is more about asking questions about your character than anything else. The group, as a whole, figures out some elements of the story that they will be playing. Where are they? How is the group following the rules? How are they breaking them? What is the goal of the session? In a twist of in-media-res, one of the questions is: What has just happened to change the situation? This can throw the group right into the action, giving them a clear starting point to proceed from.

Once group questions are answered, players assign a pool of points between attributes in various areas like Focus, Stability, Stamina, and Humanity. These will later determine the number of playing cards that the player can have at a time. Players then assign a few scopes, broad areas that the character has some expertise in. Scopes allow you to not be challenged on more mundane actions (setting a broken bone with plenty of time and supplies, for instance). They also help to define who the character is and what types of abilities they have. After scopes are defined, the players write down character background details. Character creation takes very little time as the possibility of character death is pretty high. When a character is removed from the game, the player can build a new one to insert in fairly quickly.

The other part of mechanics for the game are  Challenges, and this is where the interesting card mechanic comes in. There are 2 players decks and one GM’s deck. Every player is dealt out cards in the various suits equal to their scores. A score of 3 in Humanity means you get 3 heart cards to use for challenges. The cards are placed in the pile on the player mat and the top one is turned up. Once these are gone, your Humanity is fatigued until you do something to refresh it.

When it comes time for a Character Challenge (just the character involved in the action and no chance of removal from the game), the player plays the top card in the appropriate attribute against the difficulty set (but not always revealed) by the GM. If the player beats it, they succeed. The card goes into the bank. There can only be 3 cards in the players bank at any time. Character Challenges are called for only when they matter to the story.

Once a character has 3 cards in their bank, they are eligible for a removal challenge. A Removal Challenge is called for during combat, threat of death or removal, etc. The players, individually, say whether they are cursing the darkness (being defensive, running, etc.) or Lighting a Candle (fighting against something, being active, etc.) and what their action is. The players then get to decide and play a card in each suit on the play mat in the center of the table. The players can chose from their face up cards or their banks. The GM can choose the various difficulties from his cards. He or she places them face down. The GM’s cards are flipped and any suit that the players had higher cards in, they can choose what outcome it matches. The players assign  possible outcomes to the various suits on the mat. They are Succeed/Stay (the character achieved what they were trying to do and stayed in play), Succeed/Leave (achieved action, but leave the game), Fail/Stay (fail at their action, but stay in play), or the whammy Fail/Leave (character failed and leaves the game).

The way the outcomes are determined are a mix of highest cards and a resolution deck. The GM assembles 2 cards from every player involved and grabs some cards from the players’ decks that have not yet been dealt. Players may spend memory points (a kind of story altering point, gained in a few different ways through in character actions) to remove cards from the GMs deck (turning things in their favor) but the GM may spend Between Points (gained when a player opts to keep a good card instead of discarding it, gained whenever a gateway to the between is opened, gained when a player asks for a refresh, etc.). The players then take a turn drawing resolution cards from the GM’s resolution deck and determine what happens. If the players won hearts and chose hearts as Succeed/Stay, then the player that drew a heart could succeed at the action and stay in the game.

The mechanic is a bit hard to explain, and I don’t know if I got it down properly. It definitely makes sense in play, and challenges go pretty quickly. It is a system of choosing your highest cards, comparing them, and if a Removal Challenge is in play, doing that as a group to tip the scales in your favor before drawing from a resolution deck to determine your individual fate.

As the game goes on, players are required to make a thing called the Essential Choice. Whether or not their characters (all of them, because the choice sticks with the player and moves on to new characters) Light A Candle (fight against him and try to restore the world) or curse the darkness (give in and accept that this is how things are). Once all players have made their choice, the goal can be achieved. But the characters can’t complete their stories until the choice is made.

Impressions

curse the darkness is a fun little horror game in the same league as Dread. The unique mechanic draws in the fact that the players are bargaining with the GM (and with the world that they new inhabit). While things can be tilted in the GMs favor mechanically, this helps that feeling of working against the odds. The setting is one that has a lot of fun possibilities. The win goal of the scenario, and most things about the scenario, are determined by the players at the start of the game. I’m sure the final product will have more about the setting fleshed out, but there is a huge amount of freedom for the players to write their own story within the framework of the world.

There is one more thing I want to say about curse the darkness. At the end of the day, it is a metaphor about choice. Do the characters fight against the things oppressing them or do they give in and live the life written for them by someone else. If you are into horror games with unique story driven mechanics (the only way to properly do a horror game), then I would definitely check out curse the darkness.

Images come from the curse the darkness website.

Savage Worlds almost certainly isn’t the first game to point out that flaws make a character more than just a collection of stats, but it was the first time I’ve seen this point made so bluntly. As a player in many games, I’ve used this technique to decide my character’s actions, and received many a Bennie for it. I’ve also pre-generated characters with conflicting Hindrances in order to create some intra-party conflict.

Now, let’s turn this approach to the GM’s side of the screen…

Flawed Individuals

Obviously, NPCs can be defined by their flaws as easily as PCs, especially when those NPCs fall into the ‘antagonist’ category, and the flaws will help lead to their eventual downfall. This is such a common fictional trope that it should be obvious, but sometimes the obvious needs pointing out.

An individual flaw can be as blindingly obvious as a dictator’s narcissism or a thug’s racism, or as hidden as a detective’s drug addiction or a preacher’s illegitimate child. It can be a major plot point, or just a minor bit of color, and more than one of my NPCs has developed as flaw as gameplay proceeded.

Flawed Groups

Less obvious, but just as handy, is defining entire species of monsters and critters by their flaws. Some examples:

• Werewolves are as dangerous a foe as anyone might meet, but they are easily distracted, and prefer to chase a moving target instead of noticing the quiet man with the silver-loaded shotgun…
• Ghouls are so ravenous that they will stop mid-combat to feed on the first paralyzed victim, or even on rotten meat thrown at them.
• Kobolds are greedy and stupid, and will forget all about the livestock they were going to ‘acquire’ when they stumble on bright, shiny objects.
• Goblins are aggressively curious and stupid, and will try to open any doors or containers, use any wands, ride any brooms, look at the pictures in any books (because reading is beyond them), etc.
• Vampires are driven by an overwhelming desire for… Oops, sorry, I can’t tell you that; my group hasn’t encountered an elder vampire yet.  

Revealing Flaws

Flaws can be revealed through gameplay, research, or simple knowledge checks, but I find that gameplay is the best way to get them across. Of course, not all tribes of Goblins are going to have the exact same flaws, and the Senator’s illegitimate son is certainly embarrassing, but it’s not as bad as the drug cartel funding his campaign…

(I should add here that a flaw is not necessarily a bad thing. The Senator may love his illegitimate son so much that he wants to keep the press and the filthy money of politics away from him and his mother. A flaw is merely a point of leverage.)

Are your characters and groups flawed? Have you had any good or bad experiences with a flawed NPC or group of NPCs? Sound off in the comments and let us know!

Background

The five bases of power originated with John French and Bertam Raven, two social psychologists. It’s since been expanded in some circles to include a sixth power base, informational, but the original model focuses on the five: coercive, expert, legitimate, referent, and reward power.

In general terms, using the bases of power you can derive a primary foundation of their leadership style. In turn, some ideas on how to deal with them.

Now the trap here is to think “hey, I’m the GM, I have all the power, right?” As we know, that’s not true. Your players wield their own power, so understanding their bases of power is important. We’ve all had a game where a player wielding expert power exerts influence over the whole table and it feels like they’re in charge of the game!

Rather than try to clumsily reiterate portions—and because I’m lazy—I’ll instead reference the Wikipedia article on the subject and quote the five power descriptions for you. References have been removed for brevity and portions highlighted for emphasis.

Coercive Power

This type of power is based upon the idea of coercion. The main idea behind this concept is that someone is forced to do something that he/she does not desire to do. The main goal of coercion is compliance. According to Changingminds.org “demonstrations of harm are often used to illustrate what will happen if compliance is not gained”. The power of coercion has been proven to be related with punitive behavior that may be outside one’s normal role expectations. However coercion has also been associated positively with generally punitive behavior and negatively associated to contingent reward behavior. This source of power can often lead to problems and in many circumstances it involves abuse. Mindtools.com states that “coercive power can cause unhealthy behavior and dissatisfaction in the workplace”. These type of leaders rely on the use of threats in their leadership style. Often the threats involve saying someone will be fired or demoted.

Expert Power

The ability to administer to another information, knowledge or expertise. Example: Doctors, lawyers. This power makes one able to combine the power of reward in the correct fashion. As a consequence of the expert power or knowledge, a leader is able to convince his subordinates to trust him.

Legitimate Power

This power which means the ability to administer to another certain feelings of obligation or the notion of responsibility. “Rewarding and Punishing subordinates is generally seen as a legitimate part of the formal or appointed leadership role and most managerial positions in work organizations carry with them, some degree of expected reward and punishment”. People traditionally obey the person with this power solely based on their position or title rather than the person specifically as a leader. Therefore this type of power can easily be lost and the leader does not have his position or title anymore. This power is therefore not strong enough to be one’s only form of influencing/persuading others.

Referent Power

The power of holding the ability to administer to another feelings of personal acceptance or personal approval. This type of power is strong enough that the power-holder is often looked up to as a role model. This power is often looked at as admiration, or charm. The responsibility involved is heavy and one can easily lose this power, but when combined with other forms of power it can be very useful. Celebrities often have this type of power in society on the flip side they also often lose it quickly in some circumstances. Referent power is commonly seen in political and military figures.

Reward Power

The second type of power involves having the ability to administer to another things he/she desires or to remove or decrease things he/she does not desire. For supervisors in an organizational setting, it is the perceived ability to present subordinates with outcomes that are valued in a positive manner. This type of power is based on the idea that we as a society are more prone to do things and to do them well when we are getting something out of it. Social exchange theorists as well as Power-Dependence theorists continue to focus on the idea of reward power. The most popular forms are offering raises, promotions, and simply compliments. The problem with this according to Mindtools.com is that “when you use up available rewards, or the rewards don’t have enough perceived value to others, your power weakens. (One of the frustrations with using rewards is that they often need to be bigger each time if they’re to have the same motivational impact. Even then, if rewards are given frequently, people can become satisfied by the reward, such that it loses its effectiveness.)”

Use Cases

In general, the agreed upon power base that most people agree you should strive for–and I would submit GMs in this as well–is that of referent power. It’s based on the feeling of the user that conveys trust, admiration, and/or respect. People do things for you and cooperate out of respect. Your model leader, for example. At the gaming table referent power can come from not only being a fair and approachable GM, open to new ideas and possibilities, but also having an understanding of the rules, working with players to achieve a mutually beneficial gaming experience, and so forth. It’s not about just being a nice guy, although that helps!

So the rules lawyer takes their power from the expert base; that’s fairly obvious. They lead because the others trust their understanding of the rules, not necessarily because they want to. When the rules are no longer the driving force, say in a social/intrigue role-playing scene that may have no rules, the rules lawyer’s base of power has now been eroded; they have no power. They’re no longer the leader.

And the concept of the leader isn’t the GM or the “leader” of the party; it’s the person driving the social construct at your gaming table. The rules lawyer can be the leader of the social environment during a heavy comment, bending everyone to his or her wishes, even though they aren’t the GM or even the agreed upon leader of the party!

The other roles you’ll see, undoubtedly, characteristics from your gaming table. I would encourage you to do a self-assessment of how do you believe your players perceive you? Would they say you wield referent power or are you a no-nonsense, by-the-book GM that keeps everyone in line with your coercive power? In most cases the GM wield legitimate power; they’re the GM! However, that power base unto itself typically isn’t enough to hold onto power; you need to tie something with that legitimate power that will keep others following your leadership style.

Taking It Further

I apologize if this is boring academia to you. For me it really was an “ah ha!” moment during my MBA. Instead of trying to push players into RPG buckets I found it easier to try to understand their bases of power that could fluctuate at any given time. Plus, as a GM, it really helps to be self-aware of your own base of power.

So which are you? Tell us below and also how would you handle players at your table from each of the power groups? Can two people wielding legitimate power at the gaming table co-exist?