In 2016, on his blog Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque, Jack Guignol wrote:

Wise words: good, blessedly simple advice that does not need improving.

Nonetheless, many have tried to improve it.

• Dice Goblin wrote Just use Bears…. Or Wolves, or Spiders, or Tigers (nominated for the bloggies, congrats!), and made a great mini bestiary to go with it.

• Leicester’s Ramble made a build-a-bear system.

• Night Noon Games made a great zine built on a similar principle.

So that is the ring, and this is my hat; there are others like it, but this one is mine. And because my whole deal is index cards, it fits on a handy index card you can print (and put in your Screen of Holding).

Just Use 3x5 Bears Index Card Tool

Works for roll-high, D20-based systems (like Shadowdark).

To make any monster, pick a number, 9-18. That’s it.

That number, the MonsterDC, is its AC, its HP, and the DC of the Saves / Contests / etc it provokes. The MonsterDC-10 is also its Attack Bonus.

Fine-Tuning

If you want to fine tune a monster on the fly, you can

• drop or raise HP

• account for things like gear

• give it a special ability or two

• if it’s nasty, give it extra attacks.

You usually won’t need to know a creature’s stats. But if you find that you do (fighter tries an opposed STR roll?), take the ATK+ and split it among abilities as you see fit. To make more flavorful monsters, introduce negative numbers to buy more bonuses.

Example Stat Lines

These show what it would look like if you bothered to write out the whole stat line based on one number. They lack special abilities.

• DC 12 Warrior
  HP 12, AC 12, DC’s 12, ATK +2 D8
  +2 STR (balance: +2)

• DC 12 Wild Animal
  HP 12, AC 12, DC’s 12, ATK +2 D8
  +3 STR, -3 INT, and +2 WIS (balance: +2)

• DC 12 Wizard
  HP 12, AC 12, DC’s 12, ATK +2 D8
  -2 STR, +3 INT, +1 CHA (balance: +2)
  + Some Spells

• DC 18 Warrior
  HP 36, AC 18, DC’s 18, ATK: 3 Sword (+8 1d12) (2x HP, 3 Attacks)
  +4 STR, +4 Dex (balance: +8)

• DC 18 Wild Animal
  HP 18, AC 18, DC’s 18, ATK 2 Claws (+8, 1d12) (2 attacks)
  +4 STR, +3 Dex, +4 CON, -3 INT (balance +8)

• DC 18 Wizard 
  HP 18, AC 18, DC’s 18, ATK 1 Magic Dagger (+8, 1d12)
  -2 STR, +2 Dex, -2 CON, +4 INT, +2 WIS, +2 CHA (balance +8)
  + Some Spells

Comparison to Published Monsters

The Attack Bonus (ATK+, or MonsterDC-10) is also roughly equivalent to the HD rating from other common systems.

For you nasty spreadsheet freaks like me (who won’t be able to sleep until you know how this method stacks up against canonical monsters in different systems!) I made you this thing: Just Use 3x5 Bears vs Published OSR Monsters. Sweet dreams!

Now go make some slimy, tentacled, electric bears!

Kelsey Dionne’s advice for GMing is to show up to the table like a tiger. 

It’s possible this advice originally comes form ICRPG. I’m not sure.

But it is metal as hell. I strive for this always.

When I fail at it, it’s often because my grasp on the tension at the table has to go slack while I look something up. And while I love physical RPG books, I find it very hard to channel a tiger while flipping through a book. If I do, I’m almost never looking up rules. It’s almost always statblocks. 

So for a long time I was writing or printing out all the monsters, spells, and magic items on index cards before sessions. On my twenty-fifth time writing out the statblock for Stingbats, I thought:

We have so many beautifully built digital tools for online play. Why don’t we have beautifully built digital tools for at-table play? 

I didn’t know shit about programming outside of some very elementary HTML and CSS, but I learned! It was hard! I had four principles in mind for what I wanted:

A stat-block tool should do 4 things.

1. Display statblocks in a familiar fashion

2. Allow me to build custom combinations for encounters (or whole adventures)

3. Be very readable and usable on a phone

4. Offer no distractions at all from the table experience

It’s built now, and it’s my loveletter to you, Tiger!

3x5 Arcana

A mobile-first statblock reference tool. It puts statblocks, spells, and magic items from Shadowdark & OSE (maybe others later) at your fingertips.

You can search and sort Monsters and Spells, by level (HD) or alphabetically. Pop the little mark on the left of a card to pull it out of the big stack and into your little stack.

Here’s what a custom stack of Monsters looks like:

And here’s what a custom stack of Spells looks like:

Burn bright, you tiger.

This post is a (lightly unhinged) dive into why I created an index-card based tool for making dungeons based on the archetypical character creation process, beginning with rolling 6 stats.

Here’s the tool.

It’s sick as hell, and I’m using it to crank out better dungeon prep than I have ever had before. I made a Minecraft themed one-shot with and for my son in about 20 minutes.

It’s in beta testing and I need feedback. Get on it, ye mad fools!

Now… go-go-gadget blog post! 

Dungeons are people.

A good dungeon is not just a set of locations. A good dungeon, a memorable dungeon, a dungeon worth dying in, has personality. It believes things, it wants things, as people do. It is a person.

The Tomb of Horrors is an asshole who believes it’s smarter than you. It wants to laugh at you while you die.

Winter’s Daughter is a melancholy noble who believes in evil. It longs to be whole.

The Keep on the Borderlands is an unscrupulous merchant who believes you look capable. It will pay you to kill orc babies for him.

The Tomb of the Sea Wolf King is a seer in reindeer antlers who believes the gods drink blood. It won’t let you back in the village until you’ve earned a name.

At the end of this post, you’ll get a handy tool that fits on index cards to make a character you’ll delight in playing at the table. (A character who happens to be a dungeon.)

Microcosm, Macrocosm

I’m a Shakespearean actor by training, trade, and passion. In the Elizabethan worldview, Man is made in God’s image. All of creation is, if properly ordered, a fractal of God. The family, the state, the church, each one has a head that leads it, hands that do its work, and so on. All are made in God’s perfect image.

I don’t think it’s… like… a good worldview. (Darling, I’m a racist theocratic patriarchal monarchist because our lord GOD is a racist theocratic patriarchal monarchist!) But it rapidly orders the world in a specific way. And that’s what Dungeon Masters need.

Who is this dungeon?

You’re the lord of your dungeon. Ask not what is in it! Ask who it is.

Make it in the image of someone specific. Anyone you want. Make everything in that dungeon be a part of the macrocosmic explosion of that person. It can be anything: an insufferable cleric dungeon, a wounded paladin dungeon, a revolutionary peasant dungeon, a neglected elder dungeon, a has-been musician dungeon.

Ms Screwball has a good, weird, compelling take on this. If your dungeon was a rat, here’s a good curse, from Ms Screwball’s bloggie-nominated post, make better mind pictures:

You already know how to make characters. Just make them into dungeons.

If you’re reading this you have the basics process memorized. Roll 3d6 for six stats, sort out what archetype it falls into, and improvise outward from there.

Dungeon Process

We’re going to roll 3d6 down the line.

Each stat will be one room of a six room section of dungeon. (This has been done before, but not, to my knowledge, in as thorough and useful way as we are about to.)

Each of the die rolls will tell us something specific.

We’ll slice each stat six ways, and put each slices through a set of tables. This will give us a strong, specific framework for six themed rooms of a dungeon.

1. Roll Stats

Roll stats for your dungeon. let them tell you about it. A high strength, low intelligence dungeon is a dumb fighter; it will confront you directly. A high dexterity, high charisma dungeon is a charming thief; it will steal something from you while showing you a good time. A high wisdom, high constitution dungeon is a ranger. It knows how to survive anything. A high charisma, low strength dungeon is a sorcerer. It deals with demons.

Each stat corresponds to one room. The framework also inspires interaction with the game’s building blocks — a strength room might have something heavy in it, an intelligence room might have something tricky in it. And so on.

Each die tells you something. Slicing the stat into three individual die rolls gives each room three results on d6 tables, determining the basics about a room.

• number of connections it has (based on the logic of wallet dungeons)

• sizecurrently broken into the close, near, double near, and far ranges (as pioneered by Traveller, popular today in Shadowdark and ICRPG)

• type of room (based on the old B/X dungeon stocking rules, but with added flavor from Arnold K/Goblin Punch and the Designing Dungeons Course (or, How to Kill a Party in 30 Rooms or Less) by Josh McCrowell and Warren D.

Each pair tells you something. Slicing the stat into three pairs of numbers (first two dice, second two, outside two) gives each results on a variety of d66 tables, determining more specifics about each room, such as room type nd flavor

• specific room type

• room features

• interactions

• spoors

And of course, the building blocks of challenge and incentive: what I think of as the T.O.M.B. elements:

• Traps

• Obstacles

• Monsters

• Boons

In total, each room becomes a unique combination of 126 elements. 3d6, rolled 6 times, gives a HUGE amount of random data. It also organizes those random numbers in a framework. And folks, the combination of random inputs and familiar frameworks why we have tables in RPGs!

Because you roll in groups of six, you generate clusters of six rooms, each of which will have a distinct personality. It’s up to you how to relate them to one another. Maybe one of your clusters is a charming thief, and another is a drunk jerk. This method of designing in clusters gives you thematic shifts and dynamism. Whee!

In my next post, we’ll walk through a complete dungeon creation process using this tool. Feedback on the tool as it evolves is very welcome.

The Tables

Alright you filthy animals. I know you want it. I could list them all here but there are hundreds of entries. It’s a spreadsheet. 

Here’s the engine. 

Make a copy and swap out entries for different flavors of dungeon. Enter numbers for your die rolls on the orange cells and watch the magic spool out results. look at the spreadsheet.

And yeah there’s some filler entries on the Boons table because I’m not done yet! And I’m not Chris McDowall, who apparently eats dice for breakfast and sweats elegant, flavorful tables!

Leave a comment with the Boons I should include.

The Tool

But do you really want to start with the spreadsheet?

Or… do you want an interactive, color-coded, savable, printable pointcrawl-mapping tool? ANd by printable i mean it’s optimized to print your work on 3x5 index cards.

Here’s the tool, ye mad fools!

Next up

We’ll walk through the Dungeons are People dungeon creation method in an example. At the end of that, you’ll have the first six rooms of a masterpiece dungeon, or a 6 room one-shot you can slap on the table and play immediately. 

This is the third in a series that began with Role Playing For GMs, and then got to Better Cults.

This post is about how to create a lived-in, meaningful world that varies from place to place. At the end you’ll get index cards for two very different towns.

Bog Standard Fantasy Town

If you’re like me, you have a platonic ideal of a Basic Fantasy Town in your mind. In my home game, that town is actually called Town. The butcher is named Butcher, the blacksmith is named Black Smith, the innkeeper is name Inn Keeper. (I started DMing in middle school, and some dumb jokes stuck.)

I didn’t know this when I made it, but I was basically inheriting the Village of Hommlet by osmosis. Which is really fun and charming for one town! But it gets really old if every town is Town with a different name.

How do you make towns different?

Gary Gygax, who wrote Hommlet, and spawned all of its many grandchildren, was an insurance underwriter, and his towns read like it, detailing with manic precision the itemized contents of each room, such as: five chairs, three pairs of boots, seventeen clay jars (empty) and 14 copper pieces in an unlocked wooden box. What those people care about? How they live their lives? Up to you, GM!

It’s not especially gameable. But unfortunately, a lot of adventures still follow this pattern. They tell you where the inn is and what’s on the menu, where the blacksmith is and what she has for sale, and so on. It’s not what makes a good town.

The primary thing players do in towns is talk to people. Towns are about roleplay and relationships.

A good, gameable town is full of people at cross-purposes, people who want different things.

But as we saw in Role Playing For GMs, wants alone don’t create personality. Beliefs do. And wants, and the conflicts taht arise from those wants, tend to be universal to the human experience. People in one town want much the same thing as people in a town half a world away: security, peace, love, a chance to improve their lot. Beliefs are different. Beliefs vary wildly.

Towns are Culture, Culture is Beliefs

Picking different beliefs for different places and groups is the most gameable way for a GM to create a feeling of place, of culture — to offer the PCs a different set of choices and consequences.

You do this by giving beliefs to Locations. For each major location or region, make a table of beliefs. Some of those beliefs should be complimentary, and some should disagree with each other.

But if they’re all in relationship to common themes, then you’ll very quickly get a coherent sense of place that will generate play.

Halflington

Here are 10 beliefs that might create the culture of a Halfling Shire. For each NPC, roll once on the table to give you a belief of theirs. Let it color how they interact with the world.

Just as conflicting desires create interesting situations, so too do conflicting beliefs. Lobelia Sackville-Baggins believes that adventures are for nitwits. Frodo believes that one of his Took ancestors took a fairy wife. They have a lot in common, but different beliefs.

Beliefs in The Spear of Horrendous Iron

The Spear of Horrendous Iron, at time of writing in its last 48 hours on Kickstarter, pains a picture of a town in crisis. They can’t pay their taxes, and tax collection methods in feudal systems are brutal. A group of farmers has had enough, and is planning to radically chance the world. They’ve made a deal with a Giant to

The 2d6 Stingbats Review of the adventure condenses it well:

I wanted the town to be

• Devout

• Fracturing

• Low-Magic

• Divided about what to do

• Superstitious, especially about Druids

But I don’t want GMs to have to say that “this is a low-magic setting.” I want them to have NPCs at the tavern who think that A) magic isn’t real, and B) magic is real, but evil.

Here is where I landed on beliefs that reinforce the themes of the town.

It gives the GM tools to seed information about the rest of the adventure into chance encounters with NPCs in the town.

Example Encounter in Halgalant

When the players inevitably chat up three randos at the town tavern, the beliefs section instantly provides the GM with a way to navigate that conversation in a richly layered and specific way that reinforces the themes of the adventure.

Let’s roll and see who those randos are:

I rolled 3d10 and got a 5 and two 3’s. Two of these folks have a strong conviction that magic belongs to Druids, and prayer to Gede is the answer to their problems. One of them believes that Gede is real, and has forsaken this town. Perhaps the two will invite the players to worship with them. Perhaps they’re suspicious that the players might be dabbling in dark powers — potentially awkward for the Wizard in the group. Perhaps the one on the other side of the line is open to magical solutions to their problems.

From a simple dice roll, we instantly have a dicey conversation that will fold back in toward the design of the adventure. And if one of the players has a ring with arcane runes on it, suddenly they’re deep in the specific internal politics of this town.

Obligatory Plug: The Spear of Horrendous Iron

The 2d6 Stingbats review says this about the Spear of Horrendous Iron:

Sounds fun, right!? Go on and back the kickstarter. Pick up your copy.

This post follows my last post, Role Playing for GMs, where I outlined how specific Wants and Beliefs are the simplest keys that will unlock better role playing and a more lived-in, consequential world.

And at the end you’ll have an d100 index card to put in your library to animate even the dullest of demon-worshippers.

Obligatory Plug

It’s also how a window into how I thought about making a cult in my adventure, The Spear of Horrendous Iron, now on Kickstarter.

Let’s Have Better Cults!

Let’s apply our system of picking a specific want and belief to a faction.

What we’ll explore will be relevant to any faction, but let’s take that comforting old standby of D&D villainy: the Cult. Very often they’re just hanging around to provide players with something they can kill with a clean conscience. But… what if they’re more interesting?

Player: These people are evil, right? We can kill them? With our cool axes?GM: They’re Cultists. They do human sacrifice. Player: Why? GM: Cult Ritual! Player: For what? GM: Summoning a Demon! Player: What for? GM: Why…. they’re… they’re…. Cultists! They worship a Demon! Player: But why? Like…. why do they worship a Demon?!

No one joins a cult for the human sacrifice. Give this poor cult something meaningful to work towards! Cults have to have so much appeal for people to turn their backs on their families and lives. Give them wants and beliefs.

This cult wants 

• To be free of their bodies.

• Sex and drugs.

• A perfect, promised resurrection.

• Righteous religious revenge.

This cult believes

• Only the wicked die.

• All property is theft.

• The monarch is a lizard-person controlled by evil wizards.

• You can transcend reality if you are pure.

A Tale of Two Cults

We can keep the demon, I like demons. But let’s imagine two very different cults.

• Cult One wants to be free of their bodies, and believes that only the wicked die. So… they’re probably sacrificing the “wicked” to buy themselves undying bodies. This might be the Cult of Holy Dissolution.

• Cult Two wants religious revenge, and believes that the monarch is a lizard person controlled by evil wizards. So they’re probably sacrificing religious enemies for occult weaponry in a misguided holy war. This might be the Cult of the Fresh Wound.

Too bad for our cults, the Demon also has wants and beliefs!

• The Demon, let’s say, wants to inflict pain, and believes that betrayal is the sweetest pain. So he’s patiently sussing out the most painful way of betraying his own cult.

Now we don’t just have evil guys doing evil stuff, we have a very specific web of relationships that generates choices and consequences.

There is no Off-Script

So let’s say your players (as players will) go way off script. They prove to the Cultists that the demon is about to betray them. The module is totally unprepared for this, it just wants to you axe them. But with this very simple framework, you know how to respond with convincing texture — because you know what they want and believe.

The two cults are going to respond very differently:

• Cult one may be overcome with panicked despair, and decide to burn everything down.

• Cult two may decide their demon is an agent of the evil wizards, and work with the players to defeat it.

All of this complexity of faction play comes from something that fits on an index card: giving each entity a specific want and belief.

Leaders & Followers

Players may want to engage with a more interesting cult in a more interesting way than by hitting them with sharp metal. You may find yourself needing specific NPCs to deal with, potentially more than one. You may want to appoint a Cult Leader and Cult Followers, and give them more specific beliefs and wants.

Let’s pick Cult One and give it a leader and a follower.

• The Leader might believe that people in pain are more willing to give up their bodies, and want others to feel the pain they have always felt. Or, equally, they might believe that ecstasy is the path to freedom, and want servants to bring them the means to remain in unending ecstasy.

• The Follower might believe that they’re worthless, and want validation. Or, equally, might believe that they have been specially chosen, and want to stay in the light of this new love.

All Factions are Cults

Can you assign these processes to all factions?

Yes. Next question.

Why did you pick just cults? Why wasn’t the title “Better Factions”?

Because so many cults are so bad! And I love cults in games! Next question.

Are you a cultist?

Only sort of.

D100 Better Cults

The Cult in The Spear of Horrendous Iron

I gave the cult in the Spear of Horrendous Iron this treatment.

I also gave them plans. (This is the part most modules and situations already do well, which is why I left it out of my previous post.) These are the pieces in motion. These are the actions we were talking last time about how to motivate with specificity.

The cult is a subset of a group of hardscrabble farmers who have decided to stop paying taxes to their abusive feudal lord. here are their wants and beliefs:

• They believe that long ago, the wicked Druids enslaved the nature god, Gede; they planted rootlings of servitude in her pure, free heart.

• They want the real Gede back; they want a wilder, more loving world.

• They plan to summon an incarnation of Gede, and cut the evil roots of servitude from its heart with the Spear of Horrendous Iron!

I gave them two leadership figures, so that there would be cracks in the cult structure that the players could worm their fingers into.

• Thalder believes that Gede will take him as her lover when she returns. He wants the devout to follow in his impeccable, blissful faith. He plans to father 100 children.

• Lilja believes that only a hardcore revolutionary vanguard can make meaningful change. She wants Gede to destroy her mind, history to forget her. She plans to cut Thalder off from the authority he craves.

If this sounds fun, maybe you want that adventure!

I’ve worked on stage as a professional actor for upwards of 20 years. This is what I have to say about compelling role-playing for RPGs.

It’s not about doing voices! It’s not about pretending to have feelings!

Two Questions

In very large part, acting (and roleplaying) is answering two questions.

• What does this character want?

• What does this character believe? 

When you’ve answered them, you will have specific and compelling answers to the question you must face over and over again:

• What does this character do?

I present to you role-playing tools boiled down from Stanislavski, Uta Hagen, and a life lived in a Shakespeare Cult — into an index-card sized reference tool. One that won’t make anyone embarrassed or uncomfortable.

This is also how I designed NPCs for my upcoming adventure, The Spear of Horrendous Iron (which just funded on Kickstarter).

People are their actions.

Mannerisms do not make compelling characters that drive story, actions do.

Playing a wicked character means making them do wicked things.

Playing a naïve character means making them do naïve things.

Action is applied desire.

What a person does is an expression of what they want. Not enough attention is paid to this in RPGs! Very often, adventures will give you guidance on what someone does. Such as:

• The Dwarf will offer news in exchange for gold.

• The Kobold will run away if attacked.

• The Wizard will fight to protect her library.

But they won’t often give you guidance on what someone wants. Such as:

• The Dwarf wants to finance their journey home.

• The Kobold wants to be gloriously eaten by his master.

• The Wizard wants to live forever. 

Or, equally…

• The Dwarf wants respect.

• The Kobold wants to bring his master fresh meat.

• The Wizard wants to hide the awful secrets she possesses. 

Or…

• The Dwarf wants to be the richest being in 500 miles.

• The Kobold wants to be an artist.

• The Wizard wants to teach nonviolence. 

Each of these wants is compatible with the actions prescribed. But each of them presents a very different character.

The answer to the question: What does this person want? is the razor which cuts the Gordian knot.

What do they want? The Actor’s First Question.

The question comes from Stanislavski. You sort out why your character doesn’t walk offstage, why they’re willing to undergo the risk of being in the play. What is your objective?

Games, of course, are different from plays.

In a play, you know what your character does, and you’re trying to animate those actions as convincingly and meaningfully as possible by identifying the most compelling and personal thing for them to want. Their objective.

In a game, the question is even more necessary. You’re writing the story in real time. It’s not only a question of making something compelling, it’s a question of making it up to begin with.

What does Marian want? (Example.)

Let’s take a peasant. We’ll call her Marian.

Let’s say tax collectors roll into the town square. Let’s say they’re bad, violent news, these guys. And let’s say our peasant, Marian, is there, drawing water from the well. The characters are hanging back, eating Cheetos, enjoying wathcing you do your GM-dance for them until they decide to do something.

What does Marian do? Usually, modules give you broad strokes - it might say that the peasants really don’t like the situation. But that’s not really enough to go on, is it? It’s not enough to tell you what she does, specifically.

So let’s give her something she wants. Something specific. Here are some things she might want:

• The tax collectors to rot in hell.

• To protect her friends in the weaver’s guild.

• To prove herself.

• To leave this awful place as soon as possible. 

It is not until we know what she wants that we can act on her behalf. No amount of “this one has a raspy voice” is going to sort this out for you. If she wants something specific, she will do something specific. And that’s what makes worlds feel lived in and meaningful.

Let’s say she wants to prove herself. I like that one best.

Maybe this inspires us to drill down a bit. Prove herself. To whom?

Let’s say the blacksmith’s apprentice. (Maybe there’s a rivalry? Maybe there’s a romance?)

So we know what she wants: to prove herself. But what will she do? Attack? Make a speech? Bravely delay them while others escape?

Some context missing from our picture: what she believes.

What do they believe? The Actor’s Second Question.

When does an NPC interrupt the characters? Offer help? Attack? Snivel and retreat? Lie to the PCs? Or steal from them? Or die for them? What deal do they offer? What deal do they refuse? And why?

What you believe colors and instructs everything you do. It’s what actors ask themselves — to inform what they are trying to achieve with how they will go about it. This is what actors refer to as point of view. Uta Hagen, arguably, defined it in Respect for Acting.

Do they believe…

• they are the most powerful being in 500 miles?

• only the good die young?

• humans are a stain on creation?

• family above all?

• they’re a born leader, surrounded by idiots?

The difference between the Sheriff of Nottingham and Robin Hood is one of beliefs. They both want the same thing: justice. The Sheriff believes in the divine right of Kings. Robin Hood believes in the right of people to eat.

What does Marian believe? (Example.)

So let’s give Marian a specific belief. Here are some things she might believe:

• Everyone is good, deep down.

• Violence is at best a broken tool.

• Her god won’t let this happen.

• If you die in battle, you live forever. 

Let’s say she wants to prove herself to the blacksmith’s apprentice, and she believes that violence is at best a broken tool.

Now we have a foothold. Immediately, surprising and specific actions start to make sense. To prove herself and avert violence, she might

• Assert a well-studied legal right to a delay in collection

• Offer herself as a substitute for the taxes (Horrifying!)

• Point at the PCs and loudly proclaim “These are treasure hunters. They’ve promised to return in two days with all the taxes this town owes. I’m leading them.”

Whatever she does, it’s bound to make the world more specific, and more moving.

Using this Method

For every NPC you play, ask:

1. What do they want?

2. What do they believe?

And let the question of what they do emerge from play.

The process is simple. Just write the NPCs’ names on an index card. Next to each one, write what they want, and what they believe. The skill involved is to pick simple, interesting and game-able desires and beliefs: ones that will

• motivate action

• reveal something

• offer the players choices with consequences

Here’s how I do that:

Wants

Stick with simple, human-things:

• I want to be loved

• I want to feel safe

• I want to prove myself.

That sort of thing.

Beliefs

Pick something that specifically has a bearing on the adventure (in our example, violent tax collectors / violence is a broken tool).

If your adventure is about sickness, pick beliefs about medicine.

If your adventure is about war, pick beliefs about the war.

If your adventure is about forbidden knowledge, pick beliefs about secrets.

Example In Action

Let’s return to Marian, and see how this kind of specific worldbuilding spirals outward from the humble answers to two tiny questions.

Our peasant wants to prove herself and believes that violence is at best a broken tool.

We are now way beyond “the peasants hate the tax collectors.”

We now have an evocative person who, if you put her in relationship to anything, provokes other questions. And we now have a vocabulary for answering them, as well.

She wants to prove herself.

To who? Let’s arbitrarily say…. the Blacksmith. Why does she want to prove herself to him?

• Maybe… they’re siblings?

• Maybe… they’re rivals?

• Maybe… she loves him?

Why prove herself to the blacksmith?

Maybe… he has been making weapons to fight the tax collectors. Why?

Maybe… the Blacksmith maybe wants revenge, and believes that life isn’t worth living this way. feel safe

Now we have two very specific NPCs giving the players choices with consequences and a third is not hard to imagine. This is starting to look like a town with multiple NPCs that the players can interact with in different ways!

(These “maybes” I’ve provided can be wicked hard to come up with on the fly. Which is why you should have an index card table prepped.)

Today’s Index Card:D10 Wants and Beliefs

Here are some generic wants and beliefs that will impr

Of course, these beliefs are pretty generic. To create a specific sense of place, write a table of beliefs specific to the theme of your adventure! More on that in the next post.

Obligatory Plug

This theory is applied for you in my adventure, The Spear of Horrendous Iron. If you think this is for you, you’ll probably like the adventure! Check it out now on Kickstarter.

It’s got all the classics: a town with a problem, a forest and a dungeon.

Plus, devout religious anarchists.

Oh, also vultures with human hands, a spider in love, professional ogres, eight factions in conflict, a giant, a dragon, an absolutely stupid amount of treasure, and a minimum of obvious solutions.

It’s my loveletter to my favorite dungeon game things:

• A workaday world wrestling with intractable conflicts and strange horrors

• Problems whose solutions become problems

• Crawling with choices & consequences

• A darkness full to bursting with treasure, gunpowder and matches

• Beautiful full page art

• No AI content of any kind

• Death, death, death! for the unwary and the unlucky

It also features some of the designs I’ve been talking about here recently, such as Overclocking the Encounter Die. More design-notes / blog posts soon to come on how I think about adventure design.

This is my favorite reward: actual-ass index cards with allt hes tatblocks from teh adventure on them.

It’s got beautiful full page art (so you can show it to the players!) and no AI at all.

It’s well indexed for use at the table: both by page number and location, so you know where everythign is at a glance.

What are you waiting for? go on, go check out the kickstarter!

The Overclocked Encounter Die helps you create responsive, realistic, and flexible narrative motion in your game without any hint of a railroad. It uses the Random Encounter to do the work of making the world independent from the players and responsive to them.

At the end of this post, you’ll get a printable index-card reference for the rule, and a printable index-card example Encounter Table and Overclock.

The Overclocked Encounter Die

The Overclock: a list of likely regional or factional events. It represents the world in motion beyond your players and their actions. When the Overclock advances, the world changes.

Overclocking the Encounter Die: if a random encounter would repeat, instead, advance on the clock.

I developed this procedure in playtesting for my faction-heavy adventure about devout religious anarchists, The Spear of Horrendous Iron (now on Kickstarter). I wanted to solve the problem of creating region-level escalation of tension without creating a railroad. This was the system I created.

Making an Overclock

Write down 6 regional or factional events. These are not what will happen, but what might happen. It is not the outline of your novel, but a tool to keep your world nimble.

Entries should have a bearing on the players in this session, today.

• Good: nearby trees growing eyes — somebody’s going to see this.

• Bad: 100 miles away, the prince dies — it will take weeks for the news to get here.

Don’t get attached! Rewrite elements of the clock as gameplay progresses, replacing entries with plausible consequences of the players’ choices.

Making an Overclockable Encounter Table

Keep the encounter table tight: d4 entries per session. Swap out entries for each session if you like. But keep each session’s list to 4. It should fit on an index card.

It means that encounters will repeat. You want them to repeat. This is the engine of escalation.

Overclock Procedure

• Have no more than 6 things on the Overclock at any time. (Fits on an index card.)

• Advance the Overclock once a day. (Or more, if suitable to your pacing.)

• Advance the Overclock when a roll on the Encounter Table would indicate a repeat encounter.

• At least once a session, erase and rewrite elements of the clock as gameplay progresses. Replace entries from it with consequences of the players’ choices.

• Each time you roll for random encounters, use is as a procedural reminder to also ask yourself the following two questions:

  • How is the world responding to the PCs actions? They insulted the local merchant, and he’s a total jerk — what’s his response?

  • What is happening because of their inactions? They chose to go to the forest and not the mountain — what’s happening at the Ogre camp in the mountain?

Good Overclock entries are as follows:

• Something in the world changes.

• Someone dies.

• The environment shifts: a cave collapses, a dam breaks, a flock of murderous crows attacks the village…

• A Monster or NPC from arrives on specific business.

• A new piece of information comes to light.

• A new faction arrives, or makes a sudden move.

• Some of the entries on your clock should be encounter type events, so that your Random Encounter pacing remains consistent with the intent of the adventure. But they need not be.

Receipts

The Overclocked Encounter Die is inspired by (and compatible with!) Necropaxis’ Overloaded Encounter Die. It’s also influenced by Goblin Punch’s Underclock, I Cast Light’s Random Encounter Tables as Adventure Ram, and by Dungeon World’s Fronts and Worlds Without Number’s Faction Turns.

Overclocked Encounter Die Index Cards

Obligatory Plug

If this is the kind of play you enjoy, you might like the adventure I wrote! It’s got a lot of moving parts, elegantly organized for the GM in encounter tables and overclocks.

It’s got devout religious anarchists, a lovestruck spider, vultures with human hands, and a really nasty giant.