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This is a record of our first session of Sorcerer & Sword.

Introducing Characters

Ghanna and Chaser are two characters we played in another campaign that took place nine or ten years in the future. In that game we learned offhand that they met once before, when they both got entangled hunting necromancers in the wild forest region. That hint of an interesting adventure provided the kernel for the whole situation.

Ghanna comes from a conflicted family. Her grandfather was a priest of the Magisterium who turned his own wife over to the Inquisition as a necromancer. Ghanna learned sorcery from her father who was part of a desert cabal. But when she saw him sacrifice a sickly child, she reported him to an Inquisitor visiting a nearby city. Her mother threw her out, and she went to her grandfather, Fr. Bain. Desperate for a sense of belonging and to prove her loyalty to the true faith, she agreed to be his child soldier and spy by infiltrating a ring of necromancers in the Klau.

Malcolm Chaser is an Inquisitor and witch hunter whose wife was murdered by witches. He recently got a letter from an operation in the Klau, informing him that his own mentor Adacius went missing while rooting out the heresy there. He was asked to round up some cutthroats—the Hounds—and come there to search for the missing Inquisitor.

Krenzi Lupitz is a veteran of the endlessly transforming conflict between the Magisterium and Adûn. During his military service, he was captured by the enemy and ruthlessly tortured. When he gained his freedom, he fled to the borderlands to live as a hermit, and never again be caught in the wars of men. He recently learned that his last surviving kin were murdered, provoking him to leave his hovel and find the perpetrators.

Tulasa is a member of an ancient order tasked with guarding the Magisterium’s knowledge. Before she was slain by the Eater of Knowledge, Tulasa’s mother surrendered her demon to him—a vast library of all notable history, past and future, hidden in an apparent “pocket universe” accessible only by a key in the form of a sword. Tulasa got a report that a priestess who served with his mother was taken as a captive into the Klau, and of course he knows it’s a trap laid for him by the Eater of Knowledge.

Duke Ahwe is a 500+ year old half-human and therefore undying. The event that severed his soul in two was so traumatic he can’t remember it, but he is aware that his other half is out there somewhere. He has been involved in organized crime, founding a mercenary crew, and hunting artifacts for his antique business. Recently rumors came to him that someone looking like him has been working miracles in the borderlands, before disappearing into the Klau.

Binding the Demons

After doing some show-and-tell with the diagrams (see them here), we went around to resolve how each player bound their demon, so that we could make their Binding rolls and Humanity checks.

I wanted to make all sorcery in this setting Humanity-relevant, and I told them to bind a demon, the ritual must involve renouncing and destroying (at least symbolically) some part of your identity, something unique and precious that makes you who you are. Examples include your home, your community, an honorific, a precious belonging, or even a bodily feature. This got everyone describing really vivid binding rituals that were awesome to behold—and much richer than I expected from a first session of Sorcerer with players new to the game. Some of the scene setting included what would be Contacts and Summons in actual play, but we didn’t make separate rolls for those and I didn’t press the distinction.

It made me wonder, though, if you typically have such vivid scene setting and action for the binding of their starting demons. Since Binding is the one ritual where the sorcerer’s active score depends on the circumstances, it seems to be required.

  • Ghanna’s renunciation was of her father, over the bonfire where his corpse smoldered, as she took up his bow and called on the spirit of the sickly child he killed to inhabit it. As a result, her bow Pinaka has the personality of a toddler, and she has to swaddle it at night.
  • Chaser described slaying the witches who killed his wife Lily, as her body lay cold and his fellow witch-hunters lay dying from their wounds around him. Desperate to keep his wife, he threw his holy symbol in the fire and took up the heretical amulet the witches were using in whatever ritual they killed his wife for. To conceal his heresy, he killed the wounded survivors of his own team. The twisted memories of his wife possess him now, with the need to reënact memories of their courtship and married life.
  • Krenzi described a scene in the dungeon where he was tortured. Covered in his own blood, he marked the walls with it while calling upon his demon—known only as the Invader—to give him power to survive and overcome. After the game the player and I realized we both forgot to describe what he renounced of his identity! His demon, the Invader, is an invisible creature of shadow and secrets who needs Krenzi to smoke an acrid and foul-spelling plant.
  • Tulasa’s renunciation involved going to his father’s grave with a pick-axe to wipe out his father’s name and reduce the markers to pebble-sized rubble. Now Tulasa is the master of his mother’s demon, the Infinite Stacks, who needs Tulasa to provide them with a steady supply of obscure lore—especially demon lore.
  • Duke Ahwe’s love was a soldier of the Inquisition named Maiven. When her mentor Adacius learned that she was learning sorcery (from Duke), he had her killed. Duke took her sword and destroyed the memento of a former lover from his long life, in order to appease his slain lover’s spirit in the sword. Now Maiven needs Duke to sing love songs to her.

After that, we had just enough time to frame one scene for each character, based on the content of their diagrams.

Ghanna

Ghanna meets Fr. Bain at a caravanserai on the borderlands between Adûn and Skaalfalia. Ghanna’s mother Afsun tracks her there and confronts her father for radicalizing Ghanna. Afsun throws a poppet at Ghanna and tells her about her mother’s death. Ghanna sides with Bain, and Afsun departs.

Chaser

Malcolm Chaser is crossing the borderlands between Skaalsalia and the Elquatarus Mountains with his Hounds, when he meets a Skaalruter border patrol led by Namuu. Namuu urges Chaser to leave Skalsalia without taking any Skaalruters with him. When Chaser asks if Namuu knows of any other Magisterium officials in the region, Namuu tells him there is one that the Skaalruters call “Altin Qarga”: “Gold Crow”.

Chaser travels through the Fraustgap, where he finds Elder Kristus waiting for him. Kristus leads him to the trailhead that descends into the Klau and tells him that Adacius has returned—but he is mustering mercenaries for war.

Krenzi

Krenzi Lupitz climbs up to Hichtepunt on the Deenskewâl—the ridge separating the Klau from Deenryk. Among the standing stones, he finds the cremains of Jon, Matilda, and Timmy Lupitz, mingled with the ashes of a stranger. Krenzi gathers some of the ashes and finds a weird golden scutum. The Invader urges him to collect some Skunkblum before they descend.

Tulasa

Tulasa and his armed escort is intercepted by Namuu’s patrol while crossing the Skaalsalia borderlands and he orders his men to show their armaments. Namuu greets them aggressively, but he lets Tulasa pass after Tulasa informs him that they ride to conquer a mutual foe who will devour the bones of Namuu’s ancestors. Namuu allows Tulasa’s party to pass.

Tulasa’s escort picks up Chaser’s trail while traveling through the Fraustgap, which leads them to the trailhead.

Duke

Duke Ahwe meets with the Baachus mercenary crew at a caravanserai on the borderlands between Adûn and Skaalfalia. They ask him why he gathered them out here—what is the job and what is the score? Duke notices Fr. Bain pay the innkeeper in gold for his tea and follows him outside.

Duke and Siliona witness the exchange between Bain, Ghanna, and Afsun by the well before going back to the innkeeper to ask about their Magisterium patron. The innkeeper directs Duke to Bain. After greeting Bain and exchanging introductions, Bain hires Duke and his crew to escort Ghanna to the Klau to infiltrate and overthrow whatever necromancers Adacius has tracked there. Duke agrees.

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Note: On 22 Sep 2020, I led a “GM Moves Boot Camp” for #DungeonWorldDay, hosted by the Dungeon World Discord community. This was an informal follow-up post I wrote about using GM moves between sessions to develop tension, drama, and danger to fill the players’ lives with adventure.

Hey everyone!

I’m sorry for leaving you all hanging for so long! The GM Moves Boot Camp inspired a whole batch of ideas for blog posts I planned to share here, but they never materialized.

On the other hand, we’re planning to play session 55 of my current campaign on Monday. The ideas are bearing fruit, I just haven’t written them down for you.

What I wanted to write about was various ways I use GM moves in my prep to created loaded situations. Here’s one method that I use between almost every session, in some variation. It has roots in a practice I picked up from the Complete Book of Villains (from 1994? My beard runneth over), but process continues to evolve with new learning and the needs of my game.

What it is is a way of brainstorming and developing tension and drama for your next session, including fodder for adventure fronts and your campaign front.

The Relationship Matrix

First, take a sheet of office paper or notebook paper and turn it so that it is landscape-oriented. Write the names of the player characters you expect to see active next session down the left axis. Write the names of major NPCs, including Dangers and other pivotal cast members of your Fronts, across the top.

Now look at the big blank space in the middle. That is where you will consider intersections between these characters, based on their desires, needs, fears, and agendas.

What you want to do is place a GM move at most of the intersections.

Don’t think too hard about this. Just pick an intersection and look at the characters involved. Go over the list of GM moves from the rulebook, and pick the first one that suggests an obvious application. Make a note that describes how you would use that move in play—whether to further an NPC’s agenda with a certain character, to develop a Danger, expose an opportunity, or something else.

After you go over the whole page once and jot down all the GM moves that suggest themselves, it’s okay if you see a lot of blanks. The important thing to notice is if you have a lot of blanks on the same row, meaning a certain PC is not involved in the drama; or if you have a lot of blanks in the same column, meaning that NPC isn’t really connected to the PCs.

There are a few ways to deal with this.

For the NPCs who don’t have a lot of obvious moves, you can simply leave them in the background unless and until the players make them the focus, or their agenda becomes riper for action.

For the PCs who don’t have a lot of ties to the action, you may need to look back at their explicit and implicit background, including all their previous game sessions, and feature the important NPCs, places, and things they care about in addition to or instead of the NPCs you listed. If they don’t care about anything, that’s a bigger problem, but you can usually get them to care if you show them how their actions have changed the world, and show them consequential callbacks to NPCs, places, and things that they have interacted with before.

You might still have a lot of blanks.

What I do now, is take random story prompts and put them in each remaining intersection, and I think about how I might use them for relevant GM moves in the game. I get a lot of use out of my Story Forge Cards for this purpose, but I have used all kinds of inkblot tools in the same way, including random tables from OSR luminaries.

The important thing is, you don’t have to use ANY of this. It’s all just an exercise to get your creative juices flowing.

However, I find that it ALWAYS produces one or more focal conflicts that grab the players and keep them driven.

“Draw maps, leave blanks”. This is not a dungeon map with strictly-defined connections, but a tool for you to find connections and identify the blanks you want to find out through play.

I hope this helps! Happy New Year, everyone!

A Perilous Wilds Postscript (2021)

The campaign I was running at the time of this Boot Camp used the travel moves from Freebooters on the Frontier and The Perilous Wilds by Jason Lutes. That meant a lot of perilous journeys to reach the next bastion of something close to civilization, and any given day of travel might change the whole campaign’s direction.

This is because the travel moves in Perilous Wilds often let the players choose to have a danger or discovery revealed, which might happen in areas where your existing Fronts are not (yet) active.

Sometimes those random events would become the focus of a whole session—or more! Sometimes the players would ignore a discovery and move on ASAP. This works out fine—you just have to have some content ready.

Perilous Wilds includes random tables for generating dangers and discoveries, but I found these inconsistently helpful. Sometimes they were perfect! But other times they generated content that didn’t spark anything for me. [Edit: I wrote about this before, including a GM-move-based alternative. This postscript builds on those ideas.]

What helped me most when I knew the players would be traveling was to go down the list of GM moves between each session and brainstorm how I could point them at each player’s character, as the basis for a some dangers and discoveries that have bite. This is basically a variation of the “matrix” I spoke about above, but instead of NPCs and factions, you consider the environment, creatures, travelers, and inhabitants of the land that the players will be crossing.

If their travel involves a specific location, I have used the questions from the Discern Realities move to brainstorm what they might find there. These can help whether you only have a vague idea about the location—“You’ve heard rumors about an abandoned chalet on the ridge”. But they can also help if you have already developed ideas about it, to bring them into clearer focus or reveal ideas that surprise you.

The Discern Realities questions are designed to reveal tense and dramatic details about a tense and dramatic situation. Sometimes they suggests some obvious content, but I also use ink blot tools to create dry tinder. Just pick a random prompt for each question and see where it goes.

Better yet is to pair one or more GM moves with each DR question, fleshing them out into something you could actually say at the table (since you never speak the name of your move).

The most important thing about this practice isn’t the actual content you produce. It strengthens your mental muscles and limbers you up for developing adventureful content.

Then you NEVER have to worry about throwing out the ideas that they don’t investigate—you always know your brain will give you more ideas building on the stuff that they do.

But just like the relationship matrix, this method never fails to give me something useful and interesting for my next session. And the unused details form a sort of stockpile of ideas that may inform the background of GM moves you make much later, or supply whole situations for you when you need them.

Good luck, and have fun!

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TL;DR:

Use GM moves between sessions to generate grabby content for the table!

Glossary

GM moves
A way to set up complex situations and ratchet up tension in role-playing, including complexity in tactical, strategic, as well as moral and dramatic terms.

Pre-ramble

My last game session was my best one in a few months! I am blessed with players I can count on for non-stop cleverness and creativity to keep things exciting. The campaign has been building toward something like this for a while, but why did it all come together for an effortless, dramatic impact?

One thing I think made a difference was the way I prepped for the game.

In my last Dungeon World campaign (2016–2018), I finally mastered the concept of Fronts and how to make them sing.

But my current campaign runs on Freebooters on the Frontier, a Dungeon World variant by Jason Lutes, which focuses on the hard-scrabble adventure that happens on the way to the dungeon more than epic exploits of the characters. Our game is Freebooters souped up with a lot of setting-specific stuff.

Two things about our game require a different kind of prep than my previous Dungeon World game.

  1. The FotF travel moves create a much more open-world sandbox for exploration and discovery; and
  2. The intense political intrigue that I would usually express in Fronts is offloaded to a separate domain game. Factions are run by actual players using Kevin Crawford’s domain rules from An Echo, Resounding.

I’m sure Jason Lutes was mindful that the content that is useful to prepare for Freebooters is somewhat different than what is useful to prep for Dungeon World. The Freebooters GM is encouraged to generate dangers and discoveries just-in-time using tables in the Perilous Wilds rulebook.

I’ve tried that, but those tables don’t really suit our setting. I love using randomly-sourced content as an inkblot for my prep, but I’ve found I’m not good at adapting the suggestions from PW to our world.

I stumbled across another method, one that worked amazingly, and it was shockingly close to my fingertips.


The idea is super simple: Using standard Dungeon World GM moves between sessions to generate a small “slush pile” of dangers, discoveries, and drama.

What you need

Optional…

A method of creating “inkblots” that works for you and the established fiction. (This is where the PW tables didn’t quite work: We’ve played 49 sessions in this setting, and a lot of established details rule out classes of content generated by the PW tables.)

I listed some inkblot methods previously in Dungeon BINGO. What I used this time was B.J. West’s Story Forge deck.

Method

Choose 1 GM move (and 1 input from your inkblot method, if you are using one—like drawing 1 card from the Story Forge deck).

Take that move and come up with a situation based on the move. What are some resources, problems, opportunities, or dangers near the freebooters’ current location that might manifest?

Use the GM move, combined with your optional inkblot, to generate an answer.

Important: Jot down whatever ideas come to mind. At this stage, it’s not important if the ideas are any good, just that you get your pen moving.

Then repeat: Pick another GM move, and generate another possible situation based on it.

And iterate: Take the ideas that came up, and notice patterns and connections. You’ll find that meaningful relationships suggest themselves, based on established details, questions you want to explore, and the NPCs, values, and goals that the players care about.

That’s it.

All that’s left is adding some minimal organization to what comes out of it. What I did was list all the NPCs generated or fleshed out in this exercise, and jot down their agendas (and stats, for 1 or 2 of them).

But you could just as easily organize the notes by location—then you have yourself a hex-crawl!

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For U.S. Thanksgiving, I’m sharing the current playtest PDF of Twisted Tunnels RPG. Download it! Skim it! Play it! Criticize it! And, please let me know how it goes. You can reach me at “deeperdelvings” at “gmail”.

- Twisted Tunnels β7 playtest rules
- TwistedTunnels β6 character sheet

For anyone who hasn’t been in on the action, Twisted Tunnels is a raw and simple game of madcap dungeon demolition inspired by Ken St. Andre’s Tunnels & Trolls—especially the 1975 1st edition rules. There are some older posts about the game on this blog here

I’ve done a lot of playtesting this year, and I’m very happy about the way it’s shaping up. But it’s not too late for biting critical feedback. I’d love to hear if you find anything confusing, confounding, unwieldy, or unhinged.

I’m aware that several sections still need a lot of cleanup and rewriting, particularly the Dungeon Spiral, Monsters, and Secret Weapon Techniques chapters. I’m also mindful that more examples are needed. Plus art.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Trigger: Ambush Goal: Solve mystery Obstacle: Clear name
Location: Tower Feature: Clockwork machinery Phenomena: Hauntings
Villain goal: Greed Relic: Flask Theme: Wonder

In this post, I’ll show you 1 method for running a one-shot or First Session with almost no prep. This isn’t advanced GM knowledge, but it is something useful that I did not know until I saw it in action. It includes some examples, and some free downloads from the Risus Monkey archives to get you started—keep reading!

Getting ready for the 29th session of Planets Collide next Saturday got me rifling through my old notes, and I stumbled over my First Session scribbles. At the same time, one of the Planets Collide players is kicking off a new campaign as a GM, and our conversations lately have taken a close look at GM prep for role-playing.

What kind of prep is vain and ineffective? What kind of prep is useful and productive at the table? We all know (or we should know) that the best-laid plans “don’t survive first contact with the players”, but how can we focus our prep on those things that we will actually use at the table, and eliminate or minimize everything else?

There are many ways, some specific to certain games or styles of play. And there are better blogs than mine out there discussing them. But as I look back at what I do from week to week, and how my current campaign got started, I suppose there might be some benefit in talking about what works for me. And when it comes to what sparked the First Session of this campaign, I stole the method from playing with the Risus Monkey blogger Tim Ballew—a masterclass in GMing. Since his website is no longer with us to point to when new GMs need the benefit of his wisdom, I thought I’d take a crack at describing it.

A few years ago, Tim invited me and Natalie over, along with some of his regulars, for a one-shot of Old School Hack. Natalie wrote about it here. It was a riot!

While we were making our silly band of characters, Tim was secretly rolling dice, maybe even cackling to himself, and jotting down words. We wouldn’t understand why until later—after we dined, after a libation—when the adventure began.

I did not know that Tim had no plan for the evening’s fun. There was no dungeon map keyed with encounters for us to explore, nor was there an overarching network of villainous schemes in the offing. Everything Tim needed to weave the adventure emerged from the adventure goals each player came up with, right then and there; and that secret list he made while we made our characters; and most of all, from the conversation of actual play.

At some point during the night’s antics, someone noticed that Tim was checking off words on his list while we explored. “Are you playing Dungeon BINGO?”

“Dungeon BINGO”—I don’t know who said it, but the name stuck.

What Tim was doing that I call Dungeon BINGO can be boiled down to 2 steps:

  1. Generate a short list of evocative words, images, or concepts using a method of selection that will give you unexpected results. For this purpose, Tim was using his own lists of DungeonWords and WilderWords, picking words at random using dice.
  2. Whenever you need an idea to move the game forward, look at your list of words, and check it off.

That’s it! The alchemy that turned it into gold came from another discipline: Listening, asking questions, and building on each other’s ideas. That’s beyond the scope of this post. If you want to get a jump on it, read Play Unsafe by Graham Walmsley: You can get it in PDF from DriveThruRPG or in paperback from Lulu. (I’m not part of an affiliate program, and these aren’t affiliate links. I just love the book.) I might write about Play Unsafe another time.

But even that stuff isn’t too hard. And you are probably doing a lot of it already, because listening, asking questions, and building on each other’s ideas go with having a conversation. And having a conversation is the medium in which role-playing happens.

Setting up your BINGO card

Tim got his words for Dungeon BINGO from lists of words he made just for this purpose—DungeonWords and WilderWords. To get unexpected combinations, he used dice to select a few words from each list. Thanks to Tim, you can download these resources below to get started. Thank you, Tim!

The Risus Monkey word lists are a great source for getting unexpected content inspiration like this, but there are a multitude of options out there that can serve the same purpose: Rory’s Story Cubes, B.J. West’s Story Forge Cards, or any of the billions of tables in role-playing rulebooks, supplements, and blogs that give you random encounters, dungeon twists, or NPC motivations.

Tim called them inkblots, after the Rorschach test: An inkblot is anything that provides input that doesn’t have a settled meaning, but gives you the raw content to spark creative connections. The key is not where you get the ideas, but how you use them.

For my First Session of Planets Collide, I didn’t have any prep at all. I used the D30 Sandbox Companion by New Big Dragon Games. It has a 2-page spread of 10 “Adventurer Generator Tables”—10 columns of evocative ideas for seeding an adventure.

In the spirit of BINGO, I drew a 3-by-3 grid on scratch paper—right there at the table—while the players were making their characters, and quickly obtained 9 words from the tables using a 30-sided die. The table at the top of this post was the result, but here it is again:

Trigger: Ambush Goal: Solve mystery Obstacle: Clear name
Location: Tower Feature: Clockwork machinery Phenomena: Hauntings
Villain goal: Greed Relic: Flask Theme: Wonder

Using your BINGO card: An example

One of the players was Phoebe, who created a Ranger named Ghanna. I asked Phoebe about the lands Ghanna ranged as a ranger, and she said “desert”. That put me in the mind of 1,001 Nights and Persian folklore—like Aladdin.

Now, one of the elements on my BINGO card was a clock tower. So on the spot, I made up Yusayin Buruck, and said he was smuggling Black Lotus into the city. I said he was an aristocrat, and his clock tower was the tallest spire in Adûnibad, the city of a thousand minarets. I asked Phoebe why he was out to get her. She came up with the idea that she had been guarding his caravan, and it was caught in a sandstorm. We established that she was the only survivor, and he held her responsible for the loss.

We could have set the scene during the sandstorm and started playing there, but I was asking the other player questions too. He was a Druid of the plains, and he decided he met Ghanna because she found her way there after the sandstorm. That was where she tamed her animal companion, and 1 of their bonds was based on that. I can’t remember much about his character though, because he just came that once.

You could say the sandstorm was the inciting incident, but that was simply narrated as background. The actual play began with Buruck’s lackeys attacking the heroes just outside the city gate with a wild animal. They defeated the lackeys, and Ghanna got a relic from one of the guys they captured: an intricate stopwatch from Buruck’s tower. And that established enough mystery and drama to launch a campaign that has spanned most of 2 years of nonstop action, without showing any signs of winding down. (No pun intended.)

You can probably see how elements of the BINGO card worked their way into the conversation: I combined “tower” with “clockwork machinery” to get a clock tower. “To clear her name” wasn’t exactly an obstacle in the adventure, but the idea that Buruck blamed Ghanna for the loss of his shipment was based on that. And “greed” was very much Buruck’s apparent goal. Even though we found out later that he had more complex motivations, “greed” was enough to get us started. “Wonder” is hard to invoke, and in my experience it happens by accident. But “wonder” is part of what inspired me to embrace the flavor of 1,001 Nights and describe a city of 1,000 spires instead of a more gritty desert setting.

Then there was stuff I did not use: Instead of a “flask”, I introduced a relic connected to the clock tower theme. And I didn’t use the idea of “hauntings” at all. And though it didn’t turn into a hard boiled detective story, the players were left with a “mystery”: What the heck is going on?

What, indeed? It was after that session that I asked, who is this Buruck guy? And why was he smuggling Black Lotus into the city? I could have said “profit”, and then the next session might have focused on the sordid Black Lotus trade. But it occurred to me that he might have other reasons to keep a critical mass of the population in a dreaming state.

That’s when I got the idea of a demon-dragon attacking the real Buruck and drinking his blood. What if Buruck was a descendant of one of the Sages involved in an forgotten ritual? What if there was a Seal keeping 2 planets apart, and the clock tower was an instrument that measured the Seal’s strength? What if the dragon took up the Sage’s work after gaining his memories? And what if something caused the Seal to weaken?

These musings were what launched a campaign that the players are still unraveling 2 years on. Now I was off the “First Session” reservation and out in the domain of Fronts. And that is for another article.

Why does this work?

We’ve all been in a “conversation” where the other person just wants to hear their own ideas, and it’s not much fun. It’s distorting the meaning of the word to even call that a “conversation”.

But role-playing is about conversation first and foremost. Whatever else might be included—rules, complicated scoresheets with character info, dice, maps, figures, counting tokens, or anything else—these other elements are for reference in the conversation. Conversation is what provides the medium in which all this other stuff can play an active, supporting role.

One of the risks we take as the referee in a role-playing game is that maybe we won’t know what to say when it’s our turn to talk. Like, the players want to explore that dungeon they heard about, and we don’t have a map, a boss monster, or any ideas about the deathtraps, hazards, or the treasures it holds. Oh no!

We plan stuff because we want to feel safer during the game. We want to have something cool to offer the players no matter where the conversation turns. There’s a whole cottage industry dedicated to relieving this anxiety—including pre-fabricated monsters, doodads, NPCs, rewards, plots, modules, sandboxes, and campaign sourcebooks. They wouldn’t sell very many products if they just said, “you and your friends have brains, make it up!” Some of it is quite good. Some of it… not so much. (And some of them deserve every penny they get!)

Whether the prep comes out of our own brains or we get it elsewhere (or some combination), the hazard is that we’ll get so attached to the ideas in our prep that it blocks the conversation. It can become an obstacle to the authentic listening that’s necessary for a conversation. If we get too attached to our own ideas, we won’t notice or build on the sometimes brilliant ideas that come up in the conversation of actual play.

One of the benefits of getting your ideas from an inkblot, instead of planning, is that you don’t think results you got randomly are anything special. You know the dice or cards or whatever could have given you all kinds of other stuff, so you aren’t so attached to the ideas. If anything doesn’t fit, you can more easily drop it. You can use them to form leading questions to get the players’ ideas, and you can use their ideas in combination to make connections that wouldn’t have occurred to you.

But if you memorize a 4-volume campaign setting, or labor over binders of your own ideas before actual play, you’re much more likely to get stuck on them. After all, these ideas are the product of deliberate design. “Of course they’re better than whatever might come up at the table”, you might say. Trouble is, that ain’t always the case.

I’m surprised I used so many of those random ideas that First Session of Planets Collide. But as you can see, I let them fall by the wayside when actual play took other turns.


As a referee, you also have the duty to portray a more-or-less consistent world so that the players can make judgments based on their experiences and reasoning. That means, over time, you do get attached to certain ideas, namely the ideas that were given concrete reality in the shared imagined space. That will sometimes mean putting a cool new idea on hold in favor of established “facts” of the scenario.

But that’s not to shut down the players, rather to protect the boundaries everyone needs to participate constructively.

Okay, now what?

If you have limited time and attention for prep, it’s better to prepare to have a conversation than it is to prepare a sequence of encounters, or anything else that strong-arms the players into a given scenario.

“Story” can grow naturally from the most meagre seeds, if you water them with good conversation habits. Concrete, meaningful challenges can likewise emerge from the simplest parameters, provided you make them a “real” part of the scenario and let the players deal with them according to reason and experience.

Dungeon BINGO, inkblots, and building on the ideas that come up in conversation are not the only way to run a First Session or one-shot. You can layer in any other prep that you want. You can bring a dungeon map, use the Adventure Funnel, or generate a scenario with the Mad-Libs adventure generator. You could even bring a fully-keyed 1-page dungeon or some more comprehensive resource.

The most important thing is not that you eliminate all prep, but that you focus on what is useful. And if actual play turns your scenario upside-down, it never hurts to have a BINGO card ready and to know how to use it!

And if actual play doesn’t turn your scenario upside down, session after session, you need to fire your boring players!

Get started now!

With Tim’s kind permission, I have archived some of his inkblot resources here, until the day the Risus Monkey soars again!

DungeonWords
Mobile-friendly [PDF]
Pocketmod version [PDF]
WilderWords
Mobile-friendly [PDF]
Pocketmod version [PDF]
WestWords
Mobile-friendly [PDF]
Pocketmod version [PDF]

More and more…

10/10
Meandiering Banter posted this wacky dungeon word generator you can use for your BINGO cards. Check it out!
8/28
After this article went live, @OFTHEHILLPEOPLE sent me this resource for more Dungeon BINGO fun: The Old School Hack Adventure Generator.

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