On hiatus

Taking a break for the month of June as I move into a new apartment and generally enjoy the nice weather here in Seattle. Check back in July.

World Building: Weaving Plot Threads

A good story never has just one thing going on. To make the world feel alive and add depth to the characters you'll often find that two or more things are going on in parallel as a story progresses. You see this a lot in books, TV, and film where the action jumps between separate but related groups of characters and follows them for a short time while they do something important before the story's focus moves on to a different group. At certain points these threads intersect but it can be a long time in between and when they do it's usually because something important is happening.

In interactive storytelling this kind of narrative structure can be difficult to pull off. Your audience are active participants instead of spectators, so you can't have the action move away from them to go focus on another group unless you split the party. As any good GM knows you don't ever split the party lest a truly horrible fate befall your campaign. Instead of pulling the focus away to follow other characters, telling these secondary stories must be done more subtly. Players will likely never get the full story of what's going on outside of their view, but they can get windows into it through interactions with NPCs, active information gathering, and times when the action of another story thread intersects their own.

There's a great example of this in the movie Shaun of the Dead: The protagonist Shaun and his three friends are fleeing a zombie apocalypse on foot when they round the corner of a building and run into another survivor who is an acquaintance of Shaun's and three of her friends traveling in a different direction. They briefly tell eachother of their survival plans and then the other party go on their way. The story is told entirely from the point of view of Shaun and his party so we never see what happens to this other party before or after their brief encounter. You can't help but feel though that they're the heroes of another story running parallel to Shaun's and wonder what will happen to them. Events like this are spread liberally throughout the movie, often happening in the background as the action moves past them. They're never directly focused on but they give the viewer an impression that there are other forces at work, other events going on, and that the world does not revolve around the central characters.

A typical way to construct a story like this is to have two main plot threads, the "alpha plot" and the "beta plot" and a plethora of mostly-inconsequential background events that are loosely related to the two plots but serve primarily to add flavour and make the world seem larger. Additionally, these plot lines may tie into an larger storyline, often called an "arc". A very well layered story may have several arcs weaving their way through several episodic plots.

Alpha Plot - The Heroes' POV

This is the story your characters are in direct control of. The alpha plot is their story and most of the events that they participate in should contribute to advancing and steering this plotline. When planning a campaign this plot will have the greatest level of detail and have the most possible directions for the players to choose. If you're playing episodically, this plot starts at the beginning of an episode and the episode ends when this plot is concluded.

Beta Plot - The Under-current

This is the story happening just outside of the party's field of view. It's driven mostly by NPCs and the side-effects of events in the Alpha Plot. The party get glimpses of this plot from time to time at points where it intersects the Alpha Plot. Often NPCs that are important to the Alpha Plot will be important to the Beta Plot as well, and probably know more about it than the players. If your story has villains of the scheming type it's likely the beta plot will feature a gambit of some kind that only comes to the forefront late in the Alpha Plot.

Arcs

Most long-running episodic adventures will have story arcs. These are much longer running pieces of narrative that individual episodes' Alpha or Beta plot will relate to in some way. A highly episodic adventure may have one or more story arcs as the only thing linking individual episodes together. An adventure with longer episodes (or chapters) may have several arcs interacting within a single plot. For examples of different kinds of arcs, I'm going to use the movie Snatch (apparently I have a thing for British comedy).

Arcs: Character Arc

A character arc is simply how one individual grows and changes over time. A well-constructed character arc will spans several episodes and shows the audience how the events of those episodes have changed the character within the parameters of their persona. A character arc might follow a young, reckless warrior through a string of battles (episodes) where he learns restraint, honour, and strategy and grows into an accomplished tactician. A different kind of arc might follow a cunning and manipulative leader as she gains rapidly power, only to fall from greatness into madness as her scheming pushes away allies until she is left with nothing.

In Snatch virtually every character undergoes some sort of arc, but the best examples are Mickey (the Traveller boxer) and Avi (the American jeweler). Both of them start off just living their lives, get wrapped up in either the Boxing Match Alpha Plot or the Diamond Heist Beta Plot, and end up significantly burned out and arguably worse off than when they started.

Arcs: Item Arc

An item arc happens when an inanimate object of some importance passes through several people's posession and impacts the story of those around it in some way. The One Ring from The Lord of the Rings is probably the best-known example. Its arc passes through the story of the War of the Ring, the history of Gondor, and The Hobbit, before finally becoming central to the Alpha Plot of The Lord of the Rings.

In Snatch the stolen diamond's story arc starts off in central focus but quickly becomes buried in the movie's tangled plotlines, driving the action only occasionally but always in a significant way, before ending up once again the center of attention at the very end of the film.

Arcs: Prophecy Arc

This kind of arc happens when something is foretold in an early episode and hangs like a shadow over the plot for many episodes to come. Often these arcs are the longest and can have profound influence on the plot as parties try to either cause or prevent the foretold event. When effectively used,  prophecy arc can fade entirely into the background but never leaves people's minds. Prophecy arcs are also the most likely type of arc to cause unexpected twists to happen.

At The Table: Big Battles

In most systems, running a battle with a dozen participants is slow and difficult, but doable. What happens when armies clash and suddenly you're faced with a battle with thousands of participants? Normally a party of players characters should never find themselves in the midst of such a situation. See last week's article for reasons why. Nevertheless sometimes a story really does call for players to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with an army's rank-and-file and fight against an opposing army. Such situations tend to be more common in low-magic settings where the party are less able to wipe the floor with their enemies and level differences are less pronounced.

Today's article is about how to construct an army-vs-army battle and run it without the sheer number of participants making things unworkable.

Setup

Step 1: Terrain

The first step is to determine where the battle is taking place. The battlefield should have natural boundaries to keep it from spilling out (unless that's part of your plan) and anyone leaving the battlefield can be considered removed from the action. Draw a low-detail map encompassing the entire battlefield and highlighting any significant terrain, fortifications, roads, and environmental hazards. Also now is the time to decide on environmental factors like time of day, and weather if they will have any effect at all on the battle.

Step 2: Objectives

Mark on the map where each army's objectives are located. Is there a fortress that the attackers must take? Are the defenders simply holding ground? Are both armies going after each other's generals for some reason? Is one army simply trying to move past the other with as few losses as possible?

Step 3: Strategy

On your low-detail map, mark out roughly where each army will be starting from. Remember that armies are large and often made of several parts, so an army's starting location will be a collection of blobs rather than a single 'x' on your map. If either side is expecting re-enforcements during the battle, also mark where they will enter the battlefield from.

Starting position has a big impact on gameplay. Consider a fortress acting as the starting position for a defending army. How close to that do the attackers start? How much time will the defenders have to strike out at them and reduce their numbers before they reach the fortress's walls? Don't try to make the battle balanced. No army ever willingly walks into a fair fight.

With starting positions determined, decide on the rough routes each army's forces will attempt to take to their objectives, keeping in mind that an army may have a diverse set of units suited to different tasks. Reviewing historic battle maps can be a huge source of inspiration here.

What role does the player party play in the battle?

Step 4: Movement

Divide your low-detail map into sections. The section sizes can be arbitrary but they should generally follow terrain, with some subdividing for large areas of contiguous terrain like fields. For areas with complex terrain such as fortresses, cliffs, etc. divide the map into small, tightly-packed sections.

These sections are used to divide one large battle map into much smaller maps. Each section can be host to a single group of units. For the purpose of this article, a "unit" is a group of 6 or fewer characters, be they PCs or NPCs. Moving into an occupied section provokes an encounter with the units already there. Moving from one section to another may provide temporary benefits (such as when charging downhill) or penalties (such as when entering a forest) to the moving unit. This encourages tactical movement as forces advance across the battlefield.

Step 5: Encounters

Number each section. Now note which sections neighbour each other. If some attribute of the terrain or environment (walls, trees, water, slopes, etc.) between two sections would affect combat in some way, make a note of the effect it will have on any unit moving between those two sections. Now add detail to the sections, focusing mainly on things that will influence combat depending on which direction units come from. Remember that your players will only see a handful of sections so don't paint a masterpiece for each of them. More detail should be added to the sections containing objectives the player characters will be working towards.

Look at both army's composition and either construct full encounters to represent each unit, or simply generate the individual NPC types that will make up either army's units and randomly generate encounters from them on-demand as the battle proceeds. Remember to have stats for both army's forces just in case the players need re-enforcements.

You may be wondering, "if a unit is only up to 6 characters, how many units are in my army of 6000?" Once again this is a case of conservation of detail. The answer is 6000 is a statistic only noticeable from a bird's eye view. On the ground all that matters is who the players are fighting now and who they're fighting next. You can describe a unit as being as large or as small as is fit for the battle. The characters the players don't fight are busy fighting with other characters in the player's unit just off-camera. No need to roll dice for them or even put them on the grid. If the players win their encounter, their squadmates are assumed to also win and advance with them. If the players retreat their squadmates go with them.

Have an idea of the relative strength of each army's soldiers so you can determine outcome of all-NPC combats using a single dice roll.

At The Table

Have your battle map next to whatever surface you normally run encounters on (ie. your combat grid) so that it's in plain view of the players. On the battle map place markers to indicate the positions of friendly and hostile units.

For every unit other than the players, roll a d4 to determine how long that unit will stay in their current section before being able to move. The outcome of the roll may be modified by the size of the section, terrain, and presence of defenders. Keep in mind that a party of highly-trained player characters will generally end battles faster than conscripted foot-soldiers. It may be advantageous to for party to advance at the same rate as their allies or charge forth out ahead of them. A player character unit can move as soon as its current encounter is done.

Continue running encounters for the players and determining all-NPC encounters by diceroll until either army is defeated or completes its objective. If you've prepared well enough this system can produce a great tactical experience for players without bogging down the game with NPC-NPC interactions.

Upcoming Articles

World Building - Weaving Plot Threads: I discuss a storytelling technique commonly used to keep things interesting in long-running or episodic stories.
At The Table - Close-Calls and Character Death: My take on this much-discussed topic.

Note

My queue of articles is running out so I might put this blog on hiatus until I can get more.

World Building: Going to War

If story elements were a chess set, large-scale armed conflict would be the queen. It is one of the most versatile and potent tools available, able to provide background and framing or be a central driving force in the plot. This week I offer my thoughts on how to use war in a variety of ways and some of the pitfalls to be wary of when working it into your campaign. First, some words of caution:

Things to Avoid

PCs as foot-soldiers - Player characters do not belong with the rank-and-file of any nation's army. A character with 2 or more levels in a PC class is much more powerful than a conscripted soldier of any common race and will mop the floor with enemy footmen in battle.

Super-large battles - Going along with the above point, an infantry charge might involve dozens of combatants in the PCs general vicinity alone. Adjudicating a battle using the normal Pathfinder or D&D rules with that many participants takes an absurdly long time and puts incredible mental strain on the GM, not to mention crowding up the battle grid.

Hopeless Scenarios - Defeats happen. While a crushing defeat can be great for a dramatic storyline, being on the losing side with no hope of surviving isn't fun for players. Remember that as a GM your ultimate duty is to provide an enjoyable and engaging experience for your players. Your players should always be able to figure out a way to escape if they try. If your players give up hope, have an NPC or contrivance of luck ready to give them a way out.

Pointless Wars - Wars have causes. Armies have objectives. History may call a war pointless but for the people living through it on either side there is always a goal. Even an army of demons massacring everything in sight with no apparent goal or direction has someone at the top who knows what they're doing it for, and it's usually not "for the lulz".

Types of Wars

No two wars are alike, but they can be grouped into a few categories based on the scope of the action and the parties that are involved:

Border Skirmish - Two neighbouring states who are unfriendly start attacking each other. These conflicts are usually small compared to other wars and involve just two participating states. Often they are started by a perceived insult or provocation and end with no territory gained by either side. This kind of conflict is often used as a background element unless it grows into a full-on invasion.

Rebellion/Insurrection - Often called differently depending on which side you're on. This involves a small force attacking a larger force from within. It often lends itself to guerrilla warfare, espionage, and acts of terror by both sides. It can evolve into a regional conflict if either force gains allies. Of all the different types of war this is the one with some of the best potential as a central plot.

Invasion - One state attacks another state with a weaker army and manages to gain territory. The invaders may simply be seeking resources in some of the invaded territory or may be seeking to completely annex the state. This is often a very active kind of war with battles cropping up frequently as the invading army pushes into new territory. It can start as a looming background threat and suddenly surge to the foreground. A common dramatic plot shift is to have a sudden invasion completely derail the PC's plot train and have the fleeing for their lives until they get a chance to regroup.

Occupation - The part that happens to an invasion-type war after the invading army has passed through and claimed an area. Typically the invading forces will leave behind weaker numbers to quell any chance of rebellion. PCs in an occupied state may have to hide their identities and gather up forces to start a rebellion, or try to break through enemy lines back into their own territory. Resources in occupied areas are usually scarce as soldiers pillage the land for food and goods.

Regional Conflict - A war involving several states in a geographic region. These are the largest and most complex. Often belligerent states may have webs of alliances dictating who they attack and who they support, with the ever-present threat of backstabbing. This kind of large-scale conflict again belongs more in the background, as events are often simply too big and too spread out to give the PCs a significant part in them.

Player Character Roles in War

If you decide to have your player characters close to the action in a war, there are several roles they could take:

Elite Commandos - The most common role and for a good reason. Heroic characters performing daring operations behind enemy lines makes for an engaging and straight-forward plotline.

Lone Survivors - The opposite of commandos in a lot of ways; this role requires characters survive on their wits and skills. Stealth, mobility and subterfuge are key to evading enemy forces. Because of the power gap between high-level PCs and soldiers, this role is best reserved for low-level characters.

Messengers/Arbiters/Diplomats - The player characters act as go-betweens between important parties in the warzone. As messengers it is their duty to get valuable information to its intended parties in a timely manner. As arbiters or diplomats they must unravel the web of relationships between warring parties. These roles are best suited to roleplay-heavy campaigns as there tends to be lots of talking.

Neutral Parties - People not actually part of the war, but who choose to operate in a warzone. Arms dealers looking to make a buck, treasure hunters seeking to loot still-burning ruins, healers helping both sides, and scholars seeking to preserve culture and take records are some roles player characters can play as neutral parties.

Coming Up

I'm going to probably revisit the topic of telling war stories again at some point. Next week's article, At The Table - Big Battles, will be a counterpart to this one describing how to have a huge field battle if you disregard my advice and decide you really do want your characters charging across a battlefield with a bunch of infantry or cavalry.

No article this week.

Been kinda busy lately with personal stuff. It's all good but it does take away time I usually use for writing. Next week's article should be on time.

At The Table: Complex Skill Checks

Often times in more sophisticated campaigns you may want to devise some complex action for the players to perform. Things like repairing a piece of machinery or performing a lengthy magical ritual aren’t well-covered by most rule systems. Often these actions are too important to players’ success or the plot to wager on just one skill check. This is where the concept of complex skill checks comes into play.

What is a Complex Skill Check?

A complex skill check is, at its core, single large action spread across several skill checks. Complex checks are designed for situations where an action will take several combat rounds to complete and in this capacity are useful for adding tension to a high-pressure scenario. Complex skill checks also have varying degrees of success depending on which rolls succeed or fail. That feature makes them useful for checks with no retry, where however far you get is the limit of what you achieve. I’ll provide examples of both uses below.

Building Complex Skill Checks Into Encounters

If you are going to use a complex skill check it should be the focal point of the encounter. The character(s) performing the check will need to devote their full attention to the task at hand. If enemies threaten them the other party members will have to defend them. Damage to a character performing the check may reduce their chance of success. Complex skill checks are also time-consuming, increasing the chances of being interrupted by friends or foes. The farther into the complex task the player gets, the more difficult each individual check becomes, further driving up the tension.

Performing a complex skill check is a lot like spellcasting and for the most part can be treated the same way as concentrating to maintain a spell. Damage to the character increases the difficulty proportional to the damage received, violent motion increases the difficulty my a similar amount, and sudden noises or distractions also increase the difficulty by a predetermined amount.

Performing Complex Skill Checks

If the task involves several actions that can be done in parallel (such as opening a series of valves), then several characters can participate at the same time. They do not grant Aid bonuses to each other. A single character performing a complex action can receive an Aid bonus from a non-participating character if the action being performed would normally allow it (typically physical actions allow assistance and mental actions do not). All participating characters make their skill checks on their own turns if in combat, or simultaneously if not. Once all the dice for one set of actions have been rolled, tally up the successful checks and determine the level of success.

Often complex skill checks require a specific series of steps. Different steps in a series cannot be performed in parallel and typically (but not always) have to be performed by the same character. A failure at one step usually ends the complex skill check, but some complex checks may have branching outcomes that allow for some failures. GMs use your imagination here.

Complex Check Stat Block

Each step of a complex check has several statistics that describe what’s necessary to perform it:
Max participants: The maximum number of characters that can work on this step in parallel
Prerequisites: Things a character must have to participate in this step
Skill check: The skill check each participant must perform during this step
Successes to Proceed: The number of successes needed to proceed to the next step or complete the check. These might be per-participant or a total number overall.
Max Failures: The number of failures, which if surpassed, cause the whole process to fail. These might be per-participant or a combined total.
Time: How long this step takes to perform

Example Complex Skill Checks

Perform Ritual Magic

Step 1: Prepare ritual area
This requires writing a magic circle on the ground
Max participants: 4
Prerequisites: All participants must possess the ability to scribe scrolls
Skill check: Spellcraft DC 5+level of ritual spell
Successes to Proceed: 4 total
Max Failures: 2 total
Time: Two minutes per check (2-12 minutes depending on number of participants and if they need to retry)

Step 2: Set Up Ritual Components
You must correctly arrange the spell components within the ritual circle
Max participants: 4
Prerequisites: Trained in Knowledge (Arcana)
Skill check: Knowledge (Arcana) DC 10+level of ritual spell
Successes to Proceed: 4 total
Max Failures: 2 total
Time: One round per check

Step 3: Perform Invocation
The senior spellcaster stands within the prepared ritual circle and casts the spell
Max Participants: 1
Prerequisites: Must know the ritual spell
Skill check: Spellcraft DC 15+level of ritual spell
Successes to Proceed: 1
Max Failures: 0 (failure destroys ritual circle, requiring start over)
Time: one round


Operate Complex Mechanism

Step 1: Analyze how it works
You must examine the mechanism and correctly deduce how to operate it
Max Participants: unlimited
Prerequisites: Trained in Disable Device
Skill check: Disable Device DC 22
Successes to Proceed: 3 total
Max Failures: 0 per participant (You get the wrong idea about how it works and must stop helping. Other participants may proceed.)
Time: 10 minutes per check

Step 2: Open steam valves
Four valves must be opened in unison
Max Participants: 4 (aid allowed)
Prerequisites: none
Skill check: Strength DC 14
Successes to Proceed: 1 per participant
Max Failures: 0 total (not opening all the valves together causes a small explosion and breaks the machine, making retrying impossible)

World Building: Zoom out to Realm

A Realm is a geographic area that comprises several Regions. It may be the entire extent of an island or the territory of a single nation. Unlike a Region, a Realm's borders need not be defined by natural boundaries. Instead, a realm is usually defined by the people that live in it, their culture, politics, and the flow of resources. A single realm can be considered a self-sufficient territory that is able to produce food and common goods and consume those things within itself.

Gameplay-wise, the majority of a small-to-medium campaign can be played at the realm level. A typical realm is large enough to provide numerous adventure opportunities and a variety of terrains, while at the same time the cultural uniformity reduces the amount of time necessary to spend setting up new NPCs and settings. You can describe the look and feel of a town in this realm once and then while adventuring within the realm players can keep that look and feel in mind so that new towns don't require entirely original design. You may be tempted to make each town and location unique and that's excellent, but towns should be unique in ways that entice players to do things and explore them rather than just having a different style of buildings or different food.

Many of the principles that work at the settlement and region levels. Access to water is still a fundamental requirement for settlements, terrain types should still transition, and the speed of travel still dictates how large an area one government can control. However, as the map zooms farther out things become fuzzier:

Diversity of Resources

At the realm level the rules for deciding where settlements form start to change. Like any good game of Settlers of Catan or Civilization, access to a variety of resources is essential. People will go to amazing lengths to access valuable resources. Water still remains essential for survival, but it might not always come from coastlines or rivers. If there's ore in the mountains settlers may utilize glacier melt for water. Settlements in arid lands might tap underground aquifers or construct extensive viaducts to bring water to places where they want to settle. Areas in your realm that have resources like ore, lumber, or powerful natural magic will attract crafty settlers who make their settlements work somehow to tap those resources.

Trade Routes

The essentials of life circulate within a realm. Water, staple foods, meat, and building materials should all be produced and consumed within your realm. These goods usually won't all be found close to eachother though so they'll probably circulate by trade routes. Trade routes are the main arteries of any realm. They bring goods and information to and from far corners of the land. Usually there are a few large central cities that have markets that act as trade hubs. These will be the most populous and influential settlements in the realm.

Points of Authority

Cities exert influence over the territory around them. If you're building a nation-state there will be usually one capital city and usually a handful of provincial seats-of-power that follow policy from the capital. These provincial powers handle the actual administration of their surrounding regions and are usually the same cities as the major trading markets. If you're building a collection of related feudal states there isn't a capital dictating policy but the noble rulers may still share customs and values that dictate how people act. In the presence of external threats people from across a realm will usually band together to resist and preserve their common culture and way of life.

Evolution & Conservation of Detail

Evolution and conservation of detail go hand-in-hand. A realm is large enough that it's impractical to fully populate in one sitting. Additionally, you want to have lots of low-detail space to fill in with new adventures you come up with. Start with the region the players started in and add progressively less detail the farther from that realm you get. Regardless of how far from the players they are, you should have all major cities, trade hubs, and seats of power drawn on the map with major trading roads joining them.

Drawing a Realm Map

I don't have a super-simple grid-based system for this.

1. Figure out roughly the distances you want your realm to span and determine a map scale that works for you.
2. Draw large terrain features such as ocean coastlines, mountain ranges, and major rivers
3. Determine where resources like lakes, forests, farmland and mines are. These should be consistent with your starting region.
4. Place major trading cities in areas that are:
• On the coast if you have one
• Located very close to one one resource and not very far from others
5. If you're building a nation-state, choose one trading city to be the capital
6. Place adventure sites, towns and smaller settlements in the area around your starting region. Leave plenty of blank space to populate later as players explore the area.

Upcoming Articles

At The Table - Complex Skill Checks: Performing large, complicated tasks with a fistful of dice
World Building - Going to War: War is the backdrop for a great many stories. Bring it to the foreground.

At The Table: Dynamic Difficulty

Ahaha you thought I was going to miss another week, didn't you?

It's a problem every Game Master faces at some point: how to keep the game moving when not all players are present. To some extent Pathfinder is set up to handle this. If you're doing by-the-book encounter generation then you know that encounter challenge ratings are for a range of party sizes and not specific numbers. For instance a party of 4 or 5 people generally have the same challenge ratings, a party 5-6 have a higher one, etc. Often with one player out normal encounters don't get much more difficult, but what about encounters designed to be challenging?

As soon as you pit your diminished party against an encounter that's rated "Hard" or "Challenging" against their full strength you quickly start running into problems. Suddenly that 1-player disadvantage turns into a huge power gap that can turn a fun but challenging encounter into a desperate struggle to survive. This article will outline some techniques to help balance a 1- or 2- player disadvantage and how to apply them depending on what's missing from the party. If more than 2 players are missing, you should probably postpone your game. These tricks can only stretch the encounter rules so far before they risk breaking the game. Also remember that these techniques can be used in reverse to increase difficulty if you feel your party are having too easy a time or if someone's friend wants to join for one game.

Enemy Hit Points

Quite simply, give enemies more or less HP. This is by far the easiest way to adjust encounter difficulty. It can be used to increase or decrease difficulty based on party size and falls within the rules perfectly because most enemies have hit dice that represent a range of possible HP values. The fact that most GMs use the average HP printed on the stat block does not negate the fact that individual enemies may have more or less HP as long as it's a possible outcome from rolling the enemy's hit dice.

The key factor that enemy HP changes is the expected length of the encounter. A enemy with more HP will take more turns to kill, require more attacks, more spell slots, and more healing. If your party is missing damage dealers this is a very easy way to help balance them out. This is less useful with missing support or healing characters because if your damage output is still high you'll probably have time to heal after the encounter is over.

Enemy Gear

This only applies to enemies that wear gear, obviously. If your party is missing healing or support characters, one option is to adjust what gear the enemies are using. With HP adjustments the aim was to control how long the fight goes on for but with gear adjustments the goal is to keep the fight duration the same and instead alter the amount of damage the party take or the party's chances of damaging the enemies. This can make up for the Bless spell from the absent paladin or an application of Channel Energy from a missing cleric. Usually just changing one carefully-selected item is enough to adjust the difficulty. Choosing how to adjust gear can be more difficult than changing HP, however, because gear changes can alter far more numbers and aren't nearly as easy to do on the fly or justify in-universe. For that reason I only recommend using this if you have sufficient time to prepare.

Enemy Number

An obvious way to make an encounter harder or easier is to change the number of enemies encountered. This is easier at low levels when enemies with fractional CRs are common and much more difficult when dealing with packs of CR 5 monsters. The addition or removal of a single enemy can drastically change the difficulty of an encounter, especially when terrain and movement are considered. For this reason I don't recommend just adding or removing a member of a monster pack.

What you can do, however, is alter how long an enemy is in the fight for. This can be done through HP adjustments to just one or two combatants but can also be done by making them cowards. Having an enemy flee combat both limits the duration of the fighting and introduces the exciting possibility of chasing them down or having them go get reinforcements, effectively turning one encounter into two smaller encounters with a short break in between. This can be useful for any party composition, but don't get carried away and string together more than two encounters or you'll risk tiring your players and their characters out too quickly.

Favourable Terrain

As I've described before I like to set up encounters in arena-like spaces and rooms with lots of random set dressing to provide obstacles and cover. This makes battles more dynamic and invites players to come up with novel tactics for overcoming enemy positions. The availability of good cover (especially when fighting ranged attackers) can significantly alter the balance of an encounter.

For example, if your party's primary melee tank is missing you might rebalance an encounter by adding difficult terrain between the party or the enemies that the enemies must cross to engage the party, giving your remaining attackers an extra round to deal damage before the enemies can close to attack their squishy hides. 

Another example might be removing some cover from the enemy's side so it's easier for your ranged attackers to hit them.

If your party is missing its ranged attackers you might remove obstacles from both sides to make it easier for your melee characters to close in.

In any case, these kinds of alterations will alter both the fight length and the enemy's opportunities to do damage, thus giving great flexibility to deal with any deviation from the planned party size.

Favourable Circumstance

For non-combat encounters, how do you deal with missing someone with necessary skills? For instance, what if your best diplomat is absent? Logically you'll want to reduce the DCs of these skill-based encounters to a level such that someone who is present can succeed. The problem then is how to make it not seem artificial. The easiest way for that is to come up with some in-universe circumstance that explains why it's easier. Maybe the shopkeeper the party want to haggle with is of the same race or alignment as the player elected to do the haggling, or maybe a festival in town is distracting the city guard enough to make infiltrating the castle vault easier. Use your imagination and the possibilities are endless.

Double Rolling

Do not use this if you can avoid it because it makes the game less fun. Sometimes when all-else fails you just need to fudge it. Unlike the other techniques which are all numeric changes, this one is the GM playing games with the enemy's luck. Double rolling is exactly what it sounds like: roll two D20s for enemy skill checks, attack rolls, etc and pick the result you want. This has the potential to give the party or the enemies miraculously good luck and tip the balance in the favour of the group you want to win. Obviously this must be used sparingly as it takes a lot of the excitement out of encounters if one side always does poorly. And it's, y'know, cheating. Doing this requires no preparationat all, is not particularly suited to any party configuration, and can change from encounter to encounter if people have to leave mid-game.

Upcoming Articles

World Building: Zooming Out From Region to Realm - More basic geography and defining nation-states
At The Table: Complex Skill Checks - Dice rules for performing more complex actions

No article this week

I'm visiting friends in Vancouver and I don't think I'll have time to write it. Normal schedule will resume next week.

World Building: Adding Racial Variety

Variant races are something that shows up a lot in various campaign settings and splatbooks. Sometimes they have different stats and special rules like the Drow Elves and Duargar Dwarves. Both of these races are adapted to the Underdark in D&D and more powerful (and evil!) than their surface-dwelling counterparts. Adding racial variety isn't just about making a more powerful variant of an existing race, though. It's also about adding flavour and variety to your world. People of the same race living in different environments thousands of miles apart are quite dissimilar in the real world, why should they be identical in your setting? This post is guidelines for adding variety without necessarily changing stats.

By far the simplest way to make a racial variant is to take an existing race and move it to an environment that's drastically different from what players expect. Elves are typically portrayed as living in woodlands and being in close touch with their homelands. What if instead they're living on arid steppes as nomads? These elves may have never seen a tree. Similarly, Dwarves are generally portrayed as living in elaborate stone fortresses carved underneath mountains, but what if instead they lived in grasslands? Maybe these dwarves have never seen a mountain larger than a small hill. Do they still live underground? Do they still build mighty cities or would they live in shallow underground dwellings more like Hobbit holes from The Lord of the Rings? If they don't live in mines do they still covet gems and precious metals? You probably get the point. This kind of free-form thinking is a great way to evolve a new subrace. Just start with one simple idea "Dwarves without mountains" and jump to whatever idea comes next. Maybe draw out a graph showing all the decision branches. Brainstorming exercises like this often benefit from writing every idea down no matter how poorly it fits.

Subrace Brainstorming Example

What follows was written as it came out of my head, as an example of brainstorming a subrace.

• Dwarf
• Lives underground in stone fortresses
• Often very insular and untrusting of strangers
• Covets gems and precious metals
• Loves beer 
• Speaks with Scottish or Gaelic accent

• Dwarves without mountains
• Do they still have mighty cities?
• More single-dwellings
• Above ground?
• Squat stone houses
• Underground?
• Burrows like Hobbit Holes
• Are they still insular?
• No. They're friendly and trade a lot.
• Do they still build with stone?
• Yeah
• They quarry it in open-pit mines
•  No
• They build from mud brick and timber
• Dwarven lumberjacks!
• Do they still covet gems?
• No
• What motivates a dwarven adventurer if not shiny things?
• They're a culture of storytellers. Young Dwarves are encouraged to see the world and return home with tales and artifacts of different cultures

I'll stop there. From this I can generate a subrace that I'll call Traveler Dwarves

• Traveler Dwarf
• They live in the grassy plains of central Ashdar, but a few scattered members of this race can be found in any city
• Their houses are similar to Human houses, made from mud brick and occasionally wood.
• They have frequent contact with outside races. They probably trade a lot.
• Living in the plains, they farm a lot. Maybe they export wheat to their beer-loving mountain-dwelling counterparts.
• Young Traveler Dwarves often join passing adventure parties to see the world, hoping to return with a wealth of stories and treasure.
• Communities are often protected by seasoned adventurers who have returned home

For this race I'd probably also change the stats to give them more charisma and make their favoured class be Bard. The key thing here is that culture decides stats, not the other way around. If they need no stat modifiers they wouldn't get any.

At The Table: Agile Fighting

Flashy combat tactics are cool. Many action movies feature swift, agile heroes executing physics-defying acrobatics to get into striking range of their enemies. At the table you may find rogues or monks wishing to do the same thing. The Pathfinder acrobatics skill describes how you can use it to walk over uneven terrain, jump on to or off of obstacles, and cross gaps, but it leaves out important actions like hopping over short walls or jumping from one stepping-stone to another. These are the kinds of obstacles commonly found in a combat encounter that an agile character with flashy style may wish to traverse to close with their target

Presented here are some guidelines for skill DCs to traverse small-to-medium obstacles at speed. Each obstacle the character intends to traverse will require one acrobatics check and subtract a number of feet from their move distance proportional to how much effort is required to traverse it. DMs concerned about combat balance might want to require a feat (I suggest calling it simply "Parkour", requiring a Dex modifier of +3 or more) to use these maneuvers, or tune the DCs to personal taste.

Applied Acrobatics

Scramble up over a waist-high obstacle: DC 17, costs 5' of movement.

Hop across similarly-sized objects: DC15, Requires getting onto the first obstacle by scrabling up or dropping down but no movement penalty for obstacles of similar height.

Example: Annale the Monk wants to quickly get across a room scattered with boxes. Climbing the first box reduces her available movement by 5', leaving her with 25' of movement in a single move action. Three boxes are between her and her destination, requiring her to hop across them. Each check she succeeds gets her another box closer to her destination. A near-fail will stop her movement but allow her to stay atop the boxes. A bad fail will cause her to fall off.

Wall kick: DC 20, costs 10' of movement plus a 10' minimum run-up for a total of 20' to execute.
This difficult maneuver involves running, jumping, and kicking off a nearby wall to gain additional height. Checks: With a running start of at least 10' such that at the end of the run-up you are next to a wall (or pillar, large tree, etc), make the DC 20 Acrobatics check, and an Acrobatics check for the high jump you aim to make. Add however much you beat the DC 20 check by to the result of your high jump check, then determine if the new result beats the DC for the high jump. Failing the jump leaves you standing at the base of the wall where you started the jump.

Example: Thorai the Ranger wants to jump to a good ambush position seven feet off the ground in a tree. She's a skilled acrobat with a +10 acrobatics skill. The jump DC is 28, putting it out of reach except for a very-good roll but attainable with a well-executed wall-kick. She starts 10' back from the base of the tree, runs straight for it and kicks off. First the wall-kick roll results in a 26, then the high jump roll results in a 25. Thorai beat the wall-kick DC by 6, so she adds 6 to her outcome for a result of 31 and successfully pulls off a seven-foot-high jump that would have otherwise been near-impossible.

Pounce From Above: DC 5 + Opponent's CMD, ends movement.
You jump onto an enemy from above. If the enemy is smaller than you by 2 size categories or more, you stomp on it and land in an adjacent space. If the enemy is larger than you by 2 size categories or more, you land on top of it. If the enemy is within 2 size categories of your size, you can attempt to grapple it with a +5 circumstance bonus on your CMB roll. Regardless, if your fall is high enough to cause damage both you and the target take the same amount of damage from your fall onto it. Your target still gets attacks of opportunity if it sees you coming.

Pounce From the side: Modified Grapple check, ends movement.
You leap at your opponent and attempt to tackle him with a running start of at least 10'. This is mechanically a charging grapple and not actually a direct application of Acrobatics. Instead, use your Acrobatics bonus in place of your dexterity modifier in your CMB when determining the outcome of the grapple. Attacks of opportunity still happen if your target sees you coming. Failing the grapple leaves you prone.

Hopefully these give you some ideas of other ways your to spice up combat with agile characters.

Upcoming Articles

World Building: Adding Racial Variety - Elven cultures on Teredahar span the gamut of refinement and savagery.
At the Table: Dynamic Difficulty - The healer called in sick! Cancel the raid? I think not.

World Building: Zoom out to Region

If you followed the basic rules for a starting location described in my previous article, you should have a simple starting town with one or two adventure locations. You should also have named but not yet described a small set of nearby settlements to make the world feel bigger than it actually is. After one or two sessions, your players will probably have exhausted this small-scale starting location and be looking to visit some of these places they've heard about, or generally set out on a quest following the plot hook you've been dangling. Now it is time to zoom out the map and populate more of the world beyond.

The same rules as the starting-town still apply at the broader region level:

• Consistent access to water is essential for enduring settlements.
• Adjacent regions will have similar climates (though you can start transitioning to different ones at the region level).
• Conserve detail to just the areas near where the players are and where they will be going. Keep surrounding regions vague, but give them names and refer to them occasionally. 

Defining a Region

A region is an area defined by natural boundaries with a similar climate and terrain. Often a region will have one controlling power but it is possible for a region to be contested between powers or neutral and anarchic. A region could be as small as a single county or as large as a nation, but power isn't what defines a region; nature is. Example regions are The Shire and Mordor from Lord of the Rings, and County Cork in Ireland.
 
At the edges of a region the terrain and climate will begin to transition into that of the adjacent region. These borders can be distinct, like a river or the point where trees give way to plains, or fuzzy like the transition from foothills to low mountains. You may be tempted to create regions in a square or hexagonal shape, but remember that regions can be long and narrow or have long fingers reaching into their neighbours. For example a long mountain chain or fertile valley may be form a thin region between two others or protrude its neighbour, respectively.

Building a Region Map

At any scale beyond the starting town, it's beneficial to have a map. I'm going to describe one map-making technique here but feel free to experiment and find what works for you.

1. Start with a hexagonal grid. The centers of each hexagon are one hour's walk (approximately 3 miles for most characters) apart. If your players have access to faster means of travel (horses) and/or the region is sparsely populated, you may want to make the distance between hexes greater.
2. Place your starting town in the center of the grid. 
3. Figure out how large your region will be. This is purely a matter of taste and how much time you want to pass as your characters travel. In real life dry, flat regions such as plains and deserts tend to be much larger than mountainous or rainy regions because there are fewer natural barriers. A messenger on horseback riding from the seat of power to a county's farthest outpost might take three days, but how far he travels in that time depends on the terrain and climate. Often a lord's ability to rule an area is directly impacted by how long it takes for messages to reach the entire area. 
4. Decide what the natural barriers and neighbouring regions will be, and mark them on the edges of the hexes that will be the border. Remember your starting town doesn't have to be in the center of the region.
5. Starting from the edges, mark each hex with what biome it is (forest, plains, swamp, etc) and any distinctive features or settlements. Remember settlements are usually near water. This is the step where you decide where those named places from before are actually located. They may be located just outside of this region's borders as well.
6. Create a network of roads. Typically roads radiate outwards from cities towards other cities (even in other regions), with forks going to smaller towns, castles, etc. Roads go around obstacles such as bogs and hills, potentially veering significantly.
7. Remove the hex grid and add as much detail as you like. 

Example Region

Here is a map of the Red Hills region in the nation called Din from my Teredahar setting.

Upcoming Articles

At The Table: Agile Fighting - Let your agile characters perform tactical acrobatics and parkour-style movement in combat.
World Building: Adding Racial Variety - Surface-dwelling German-accented Dwarves? Hell yes.

At The Table: Breaking Through Walls

Picture this situation: You have a well-prepared prepared boss encounter with nicely-arranged arena and list of tactics the boss will use. The plan calls for the boss to disable the party's main attacker and then flee when his health gets low. Everything goes according to plan until the boss attempts to make his escape. The PCs roll well and shrug off the boss's disabling attack. When he tries to escape instead of being forced to let him go the party pursue. The boss throws open his secret door and dashes out of the building, with the party hot on his heels.... And then what?

In this kind of situation it's easy for a DM to get flustered. Suddenly the action is outside of your nicely-planned arena and quite possibly outside of the dungeon entirely. The PCs are still immersed in the action but any significant break in the pace will quickly break that immersion. What you need to do is keep the action moving, break through the walls of your dungeon, and let the fight break out into the street/woodlands/fire-plains outside.

Here are some things to consider that will make it easier to let the action break out of the dungeon.

1. What's the lay of the land?

This is simply a starting point. Where is the dungeon? Is it a cave on a mountainside or a nondescript townhouse's basement? What kind of weather and terrain might be found outside of such a location? What time is it?

2. What's typically found in that environment?

A carefully-planned arena will generally feature obstacles and random set dressing that provide cover for players and enemies or generally make combat more interesting and dynamic. Adhoc locations outside of your planned dungeon need these things as well. A hillside outside a cave may be wooded or littered with boulders. A city street may have various buildings, carriages, merchant's stalls, and lamp posts. If you're not sure what the environment will look like or have in it I recommend looking online for pictures of similar environments for inspiration.

3. What's going on outside?

Once you've answered 1 and 2 this is easy. A city street in daytime will have random people just going about their business. At night it will be empty save for vagrants and night-owls. For outdoors locations roll a die to determine the weather. In the wilderness you can optionally roll a random encounter to add unexpected monsters to the encounter, saying they were drawn by the noise of battle. 

4. How will people/things outside react?

Wild animals may flee or attack. Rough terrain may shift and slide. In cities the reaction to a battle will vary with the city's lawfulness and general danger level. Citizens in very dangerous cities may regard the party's battle with complete apathy, or possibly even aid the villain.

5. Don't Hesitate

When the party take things off the rails mid-encounter, just start drawing more stuff on your battle mat like it was always there. You can fill in details as you describe them, just keep your tone of voice the same as during the battle, keep using the initiative order from the previous battle, and get back to the action as quickly as possible.

World Building: Starting a World Book

A World Book (often called a Campaign Bible) is exactly what it sounds like. A book of your world. It describes the people, places, and things in the world and provides a way to organize your thoughts. It's not something your bring to the table (usually) but rather a resource for preparing adventures. The structure of a world book should be well-defined, with sections divided by subject matter and a regular template within each section. You don't want to spend all of your planning time rummaging through disorganized notes.

A World Book can take many forms. It can be a simple notebook with pages between sections left blank to fill in later, a 3-ring binder, or even an online wiki. What medium to choose largely depends on personal preference and how much exposition and detail you want your world to contain.

Sections of a World Book

There are four major sections of a World Book: People, Places, Things, and Events. Each of these sections can have subsections, but try not to divide any deeper. Nothing needs to be written out long-form; every section can just be full of bullet-point notes. See the examples section at the end of this post for some excerpts from my own World Book.

People

There's going to be two definite subsections to People. The first is Peoples. In the Peoples section you describe each race's ethnic traits, religions, and cultural history. The second section is Important Individuals. These are the important players in your world, past and present. Describe their physical traits, achievements, and legends that may have appeared around those achievements.

Places

Primarily this section is interested with describing the regions of your world. Focus on background details like climate and geography and then start thinking about territories. At the highest level of detail a page in this section might outline a nation-state including its climate, people (referring to the People section), imports, exports, and political/military situation. This section is part of a feedback loop with your world map. The map creates natural barriers and biomes that form the basis of territories, which in turn inform where on the map you draw borders, roads, fortresses, etc.

Things

This is a bit of a catch-all, but most importantly this section describes technology. How does the complex interaction of magic and technology play out in your world? Who makes the best weapons in the world? What do the armies of the richest nations equip their soldiers with?

Events

History should be spread throughout your World Book where appropriate to help describe things. This section is for describing the world-changing events that shape the course of your world's history and influence everything that happens after.

Examples from Teredahar

Example of a detailed cultural history

The Psionic Peoples
Sometime around TR 8000 the Illithid race began expanding their domain in the deep subterranean of Tereredahar. Their conquests brought them a vast number of new peoples to consume or enslave. They already had Gith slaves since before coming to Prime. The Drow make poor slaves, but the dwarves and humans they found in their midst proved quite suitable. Modern Illithid society in The Deep and on the Astral Plane was built on the backs of legions of human and dwarven slaves.
In addition to simple slave labor, members of the Prime-native races were subjected to scientific experimentation. It was the survivors of these experiments who became the first psionics. They would come to be called Wilders. The trauma of their ordeals became a source of power then turned to rage against their captors.
Together with a force of natural-born sorcerers, the wilders staged a slave uprising and overthrew their masters. They fled deeper into The Deep to hide from reprisal and there began to study their powers and form a society. They called themselves the Deep Covenant.
With the help of the Deep Covenant more slaves where freed and more psionics joined their cause. The generation of formally-trained psionics were called Psions. In time they became the majority among the Deep Covenant. In time different ideological groups broke off from the Deep Covenant and chose to live elsewhere in The Deep and on the surface of Teredahar. They are Dal'Hellum, The Deepstalkers, and the Wind People.

Dal'Hellum

• Comprised almost entirely of Duergar (deep dwarves)
• Largest population is under Ashdar in the Upper Deep and in some mountainhomes, most notably Kor's Geode, where they overthrew the Mountain Dwarf ruler in TR 10080
• They're known to be sneaky and cunning
• They practice an ordered, logical training regimen that makes them good soldiers when they choose to act openly (which is infrequent)

Example of a Nation-State

The United Republic of Din

• Boundaries (neighbours): The Pale River (Kurudar), Balsom River (Koldar), Koldar River (Ashdar), The Dragon Ocean
• Primary inhabitants: Plains Dwarves, Hill Dwarves, Humans
• Biomes: Coastal lowlands, swamp, volcanic wash, damp coastal islands
• Climate: Temperate with humid summers and rainy winters
• Political: Elective representative republic. One of the few democracies on Teredahar.
• Largest Settlement: Dolvan Keep, a large city built around an old fortress. It is the seat of government and a major north-south trading hub, particularly for the export of refined metal ingots.
• Exports: Raw and worked metal, lumber, fish
• Imports: Food, textiles, magical goods

Example of a piece of technology

Powerstone Cannon

• A typical powerstone shell is a rough sphere, about 8" wide. Some are larger or smaller.
• Powerstone shells are very prone to breaking (and exploding) if damaged
• They handle blunt impacts ok, but if hit on a point will shatter
• Before the invetion of metal jackets for the shells, the cannon barrels had to be completely smooth to avoid breaking the shell in the barrel
• Metal jackets have led some weaponsmiths to experiment with rifled-barrel artillery pieces

At The Table: Adding Detail to Combat

Combat is a core element of D&D. The vast majority of the rules are related to adjudicating combat, and the majority of character's abilities are only really useful in combat situations. The side-effect of this is that combat is a very mechanics-heavy math break that can break player's immersion in the game as they study their character sheets, battle mat, and dice. One simple way to help hold players in the universe is by adding more description to events. Instead of simply saying "the Orc's attack misses", a GM wanting to improve immersion could say "the Orc swings wide, leaving a gash in the wall behind you" while looking across the table at the player who is being attacked. Producing these descriptions quickly without pausing or stammering requires either practice or preparation. Here are some guidelines to help you provide these on-the-fly descriptions of action:

Know the surroundings

This comes naturally when designing an encounter. Most encounters can be thought of as taking place in an arena, be it a dungeon room or square kilometer of woodlands. Whatever the area you expect your battle to take place in, be sure you know what's in it. Focus on things likely to be interacted with or stood near during battle like as walls, terrain, and anything players or enemies might use for cover.

Know the actors' defenses

To effectively add detail you'll need to know what defenses the players and enemies have. This is important so you know if you can describe an arrow glancing off a fighter's shield or being stopped in a flash of light from a wizard's Mage Armor. The easiest way to keep track of this it to have access to a copy of each of your players' character sheets, and keep track of temporary defenses (like Mage Armor) on a scratch pad.

Melee Attack Misses

Result relative to AC	Attack stopped by*	Example Outcomes
Close call -1 to -2	Armour, or Natural Armorr	The attack got past your defenses and struck your body. You were saved only by your armour "The warhammer strikes with a loud crunch, but your armour holds" "The blade glances off your armour, trailing sparks"
Blocked -2 to -5	Shield or Deflection	The attack was on-target but you kept it from hitting your body "You parry the attack with your shield" "The blade is turned aside by your magic defenses"
Miss -5 or lower**	Dex	You evaded the attack, or it went wide and hit something around you "The Golem swings his axe high and you simply duck under it" "The Orc swings wide, smashing the table next to you and scattering its contents across the floor"

Ranged Attack Misses

Result relative to AC	Attack stopped by*	Example Outcomes
Near-miss*** -1 to -3	Natural Armour or Shield	"The shot embeds itself in your shield" "Your arrow breaks against the dragon's scales"
Close -3 to -5	Armour, Deflection, or Dex	"The bolt plinks off your armour" "You sidestep the shot"
Miss -5 or lower	Object or terrain	"The arrow embeds itself in the wall behind you" "The shot goes sailing off into the night"

*If the character doesn't have this defense, pick the next one down
**Within reason, a very bad role doesn't require any player ability to evade
***I use a home-rule where projectile near-misses have a chance of hitting a randomly-chosen adjacent target.

World Building: Where to Begin

Start Small

You probably have grand ideas in your head about what your campaign world will be like: cities floating in the clouds, fierce battles, golden plains of wheat stretching to the horizon, things like that. That's good but thinking about such things before pencil hits paper is just going to give you too much to worry about too soon.

Focus on just a single location where your first few play sessions will take place. The GM guides are a great resource for setting up a single coherent location. I recommend this location be a settlement with a nearby adventure. This kind of "starting town with a haunted mine" seems cliche but there's a simple reason it turns up everywhere: It's easy for both the GM and the players. Everyone knows what to expect which means you can focus on getting used to your players and new players can get used to the game. The guidebooks will help you handle the mechanics of a town and the first adventure site, but the look and feel of the place is still up to you.

A Basic, Believable Settlement

...Just add water. Seriously, assuming your setting is using the pseudo-medieval background expected by most game systems then access to water is an essential first step in creating a town. A river or lake provides drinking water, irrigation for crops, a way to move goods, and a source of food.

...Heat/chill until ready. The next consideration is climate. Human civilization springs up in virtually every place with sunlight and access to fresh water, so this is mostly just a flavour decision. Choose carefully though, because no climate exists in a vacuum and when it comes time to zoom the map out and create surrounding areas it will be your job to make the terrain believable.

...Season to taste. Now that you know the climate of your settlement you can actually create the place. I highly recommend basing your settlement on real-world examples from similar climates. Earth has examples of people living in virtually every environment imaginable and reading about places like yours will help you get a clear mental picture of what the place looks like. Once you have that picture in your head you can shape it to fit what you have designed on the mechanical side (races, population, etc) and use that image to describe it at the table.

Conservation of Detail

Now that you have your anchor town as a dot on the map, it's going to be very lonely without some more dots. Good storytelling makes the world seem bigger than just what's on the page. Consider some of the dialogue from the first act of Star Wars: A New Hope. On Tattooine the characters throw out location names like "Anchorhead", "Toshi Station" and "Mos Eisely" in casual conversation, but only one of those places is ever visited in the main storyline. It's good to have such places just for some NPC to say they're from there, have news arrive about there, or just give the players new places to think about once they're settled in your starting village. Just don't get carried away.

Conservation of Detail is about making the areas near the players feel alive and populated without having to design everything up-front. Travel in medieval settings is usually very slow. Few people ever travel beyond the borders of their own county much less to the next nation. What this means for you is that only the area within a few miles of your settlement and adventure site needs to be fleshed out. If there are mountains in the distance, draw them, and if you want a well-known major city in the same region as the players you should know which road leads there but not necessarily where it is.

That's all that's needed to start a new campaign setting. If your players like it there will be more work to finish when they leave the first settlement & adventure site.

About

This Blog

Until I'm convinced anyone is actually reading this I'm sticking to train-of-thought first-person writing. This blog is a place for me to write down notes about my game mastering (henceforth 'GMing') methods and the answers to questions I've been asked one time too many. If this becomes worthy of any greater effort then maybe things will get more formal, but for now it's just me and Blogger.

Some topics I hope to cover are world creation and at-the-table GMing. Articles will be short, focused, and contain first-hand examples when possible. The intended reader is a new GM or player interested in GMing, with access to the necessary rulebooks and the ability to Google things.

The Author

I started playing D&D around 2000 not long after 3rd edition came out. In 2002 I started developing my own campaign setting and GMing short 1-off games for a group of friends. Later that year once my setting had matured a little I began what remains the longest-running campaign I've ever run. From 2002 to 2005 I ran a group of 6 to 8 players through an ever-evolving campaign set in my world. When 3.5E came out we immediately picked it up as a marked improvement over 3E. To date I've never run a premade module though I've played a few. I vastly prefer the personal touches of homemade settings.

After a long hiatus in university where I GM'd very little I decided to get back into it. I'd played 4E a handful of times but it wasn't for me, so I switched from D&D to Pathfinder. Since the majority of my experience was in 3.5 I found the jump to Pathfinder much more tolerable. I'm on the third year now of GM'ing for my current group, and still using a refined version of the setting I created in 2002.

Copyrights

All original content is copyright of its author, shared freely under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license unless noted otherwise.Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), its related brands, and content are copyright of Wizards of the Coast.
Pathfinder, its related brands, and content are copyright of Paizo Publishing.