Standing up from my last campaign my players said something that I was not sure should I feel hurt by - that my last couple of campaigns had the same feel. I thought I ran some fairly different things
- Brancalonia
- Spelljammer
- Hexcrawl25
But I wonder if they feel the same because these players have other very different GMs to compare against so the innate similarities of my DM style overwhelmed all other differences? I ran them differently enough to my own perceptions that I got three completely different things out of them but I guess I must reuse parts more than I thought...
At this point I am old and ugly enough to recognise the wisdom of not attempting to make everything unique. "Just Use Bears" is a load-bearing stone on my own personal journey to wisdom.
In the interest of being honest, there are certainly things I reuse
- the campaign world / lore - I have a small handful of players who have popped up in more than one campaign who then recognize some of the tales of the hazards below them or have run into aspects of factions in other guises faraway. This I think is the best kind of repetition, the rest just make my life easier.
- menagerie world / kaleidoscope species - at this point the utility of this 'universal socket' world for open table gaming has been proven and reproven. Variety in the d100 NPC species table that makes "Sword Coast Diversity" look like a klan rally in comparison. Want to be some odd species? No problem, noone even looks sideways at you. Talking goose? Can do.
- opportunity to think around obstacles / no-roll success for good ideas - tell me your sufficiently cunning and creative plan and I'll be happy to say you just succeed.
- one-shot framework (Splinters, Brancalonia) - Brancalonia was 'the money's been drunk, the booze is run out, your patron/landlord has a job for you' with a side order of 'I am assured the dragon is dead this time'. For Splinters it was 'hop through this portal, fetch that bit of wood we need for our ritual' - both worked well to get things rolling.
Within campaigns, but not across them I guess repetition is a motif as well
- For Spelljammer, ship deck plans came up again and again, where most other combats usually happen on some different backing, the fact that of course a fight involving your ship means you break out the same deckplan gets really noticeable after a while.
- NPCs (as per adventure threading) - within a campaign I try to reuse the cast, I have snuck in a mention or two of NPCs from one campaign to another but the differences in tone have never really made 'guest appearances' make much sense.
To return to the specific point of my blogwagon comrades, there are typically four types of dungeon - reliably abandoned and dangerous structures - in menagerie world (on the continent everything has happened on so far) drawn from great buried hazard-strata from the continental history
- ruined temples from the cult purge a few decades back - these are for unquiet spirits, undead, bloody rituals and cults. Shallowly buried threats being dug up by fanatics.
- fortified shrines of the predator queens many hundreds of years ago. There are for running into the petty gods, hideous artefacts, and determined relic hunters looking for war-winning weapons.
- bunkers and fortresses from the first dwarven empires war against the Final Star many thousands of years ago. These are sections of the Apocalypse Archive; for the spooky tense 'this is not a place of honour' crawls through a place where something terrible obviously happened, with lots and lots of grim defenses pointed toward some as yet un-found horror.
- wizard towers abandoned by their masters at all points down the timeline. Wildcards, but always hazardous because wizards.
It bears repeating.
It bears repeating.
It bears repeating.
It bears repeating.
It bears repeating.
It bears repeating.
Showing posts with label lessons learned. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lessons learned. Show all posts
20 June 2026
17 June 2026
Campaign Retrospective: Realm of the Reluctant King (Hexcrawl25 )
Finally ran the last session for the main-line of the Hexcrawl25 campaign, so let us do a retrospective Against the Wicked City style since there were a lot of experimental practices running under the hood in this one.
Realm of the Reluctant King (Hexcrawl25), 28 Sessions (Jan 2025-May 2026)
What it was:
Actually a dual-mode campaign with persistent campaign and one-shot open tables running on the same map. 83% of sessions were the main campaign so we shall focus on that here. I will continue to use this as an easy frame for running one-shots.
- An experiment in bringing an old-school techniques to a typically '5e/Trad/one-shots' crowd.
- Pitched as a classic campaign testing a hexcrawl/west marches model where the players tell me what they want to do of a session.
- Running 5e but with old-school XP accrual - treasure recovery, monsters slain (or overcome/avoided), treasure squandered through carousing, hexes explored.
- Run when we had any three players; sometimes allowing a 'ride-along' open-table player
For completeness, the six adventures used for standalones in parallel were:
Waking of Willoughby Hall
Winters Daughter
Hole In The Oak
Home Reforged
Old Man Katan & Mushroom Band
Splinters: Land of the Dead
What worked:
Realm of the Reluctant King (Hexcrawl25), 28 Sessions (Jan 2025-May 2026)
What it was:
Actually a dual-mode campaign with persistent campaign and one-shot open tables running on the same map. 83% of sessions were the main campaign so we shall focus on that here. I will continue to use this as an easy frame for running one-shots.
- An experiment in bringing an old-school techniques to a typically '5e/Trad/one-shots' crowd.
- Pitched as a classic campaign testing a hexcrawl/west marches model where the players tell me what they want to do of a session.
- Running 5e but with old-school XP accrual - treasure recovery, monsters slain (or overcome/avoided), treasure squandered through carousing, hexes explored.
- Run when we had any three players; sometimes allowing a 'ride-along' open-table player
For completeness, the six adventures used for standalones in parallel were:
Waking of Willoughby Hall
Winters Daughter
Hole In The Oak
Home Reforged
Old Man Katan & Mushroom Band
Splinters: Land of the Dead
What worked:
03 June 2026
Fear not the big booms
tl;dr: no need to be afraid of early-modern fire-arms in your campaign
longstanding question about guns in D&D - my experiences no need to worry too much. I have had gunpowder crop up in two campaigns so far - Spelljammer Light of Xaryxis and Hexcrawl25 Realm of the Reluctant King - and in neither did it wreck the campaign.
First and most simply - one of the party was a musket armed Giff in the Spelljammer game and they played the part of a sniper par excellence - but no moreso than the long-bow wielding elf I adventured alongside in Out of the Abyss. Campaign took place in wildspace/on planets and in any case I was playing the campaign as written so no phlogiston nor the ignition risk of gunpowder associated with that. All in all, it was wholly a flavour thing beyond one trap made out of gunpowder barrels.
The players even made fairly large scale anti-shipping contraptions they launched with some spiky trap things included but never tried to acquire or incorporate gunpowder for whatever reasons.
In the second campaign - the Hexcrawl25 game - gunpowder had a lot more of a place but still did not break the game or ruin the flavour. It was introduced somewhat as an accident because I had resolved to try and use as much of Knock#1 as possible in that campaign and so when they searched the back rooms of a tavern unexpectedly I decided the '20 Gunpowders' table could be fun and it went from there.
The first thing they found was a heap of 'dragonpowder' - magical thermite essentially that "a wizard left there" which they stuffed into a bag and scarpered with. Afterwards I used a usage dice system to track depletion for their rather random use of it. It came in very handy for venturing through an insectfolk labyrinth where they used it to burn open some vaults.
With the knowledge that in-world there were such things, they took themselves to a goblin-market and traded various battlefield lootings for some more explosive powders - a handful of vials of saintsbone and a pouch of organic goblins-own gunpowder that could theoretically be self-replenishing. After this they took themselves off to commission a shotgun/blunderbus type weapon for the dwarf and after that considered themselves ready. These were a few mini-quests over a series of sessions as they were traipsing too and fro across the hexmap so I considered those things well earned.
Their final set up was for the dwarf to have the shotgun with their small squire riding on their shoulder and serving as a loader in fights. They also put a saddle-horn type mount for the gun on the top of their big lizard beast of burden so that the two small minions could operate it from beast-back while everyone else dismounted to fight on foot.
In the end, it never came into play as a game-breaking thing - it let the dwarf fighter participate in fights at range alongside the sorcerer and artificer - at about the same level of effectivenss which I could live with. Often at close quarters the noise of using the shotgun stopped it from being a 'first strike' weapon and the party as a whole leaned more on magic.
The funny thing is that these gunpowders came into play at the climax of each of the dungeons in Knock#1:
- In Citadel of Evil a batch of dragonpowder bundled to a vial of alchemists fire was catapulted into the main stairwell and set off an inferno that both torched out the top floors of the castle but also cut off the main villains line of retreat.
- In Praise the Fallen the main villain was about to teleport away on their initiative when the herbalist-themed artificer catapulted a bundle of all the saintsbone at their feet for great fistfuls of damage dice. This also threw some damage on most of the party and deafened them but it did succeed in over-killing the villain before they could flee
- In Zaratazarat's Manse when they found the mysterious monster-spawning slab they dumped most of their remaining dragonpowder onto it to burn through the slab while they fought the rest of the things around them. If I recall correctly some poor unfortunate bullywug or locathah spawned onto the table in the middle of that inferno and did not have a fun time either.
Otherwise, the dragonpowder saw the most use for burning through things and general destruction and mayhem against non-moving foes or other obstructions. Weirdly, they also decided during one significant night carousing to try inhaling dragonpowder and some more rolls on the goblin activity table established it to be a fairly effective hang-over cure.
There was two other notable uses of explosives throughout the campaign - first to cover a prison escape and second to collapse a doorway with hostiles on the far side.
The prison escape hinged off roping in some dwarven artificers who were part of the group being rescued to set up the trigger mechanisms to turn the explosives the players could supply into the time-delayed inferno they needed. I was pretty happy with this, as it was a pretty cunning plan overall relying on a pushing a rigged mine-cart onto a lift to the enemy camp above and then running like hell. The challenge for the players was not trivialised by the availability of explosives, so all to the good.
The door collapse was during the final session - while fighting thralls in "The Aboleths Dream" by Elven Tower the party had wedged the door leading into room seven while they fought other thralls. More thralls gathered from room(s) eight to bash down the door and had splintered it open Shining style when one of the party Catapults a bundle of vials of explosives wrapped around an alchemists fire. Big kaboom, bought them time to run off, and on their exit up stairs one they touched off the last of their gunpowder to shatter the entrance and let them get away.
In two separate campaigns the players never really went all-in on the potential of having access to explosives - except for the above 'big boss killer' moments. We were not seeing land-mine equivalents, doors being blown off hinges, explosives rolled into enemy strong points or similar item-focussed problem solving.
To mirror this, I did not lean heavily into explosives being in the hands of adversaries - the RAW magical ranged attacks of Astral Elves in the Light of Xaryxis campaign were sufficient for them. For the hexcrawl, the two major groups of adversaries so far have been mobs of cultists ambushed in tunnels and great beasts fought out in the open, neither of which have been made boring by the dwarf having a shotgun. The tunnel fights had a big element of sneaking about to not draw down the rest of the dungeon which kept things interesting. The big beasts were generally big enough that even a shotgun was not going to cut much mustard.
The main lesson I took from all this was that the gamebreaking potential of low-rate of fire weapons is overstated - the magical fire-power of standard classes of characters is equivalent, if not better. I cannot promise if you throw in some odd explosives for flavour, your players won't wreck your campaign but two completely different sets of players (different ages, nationalities, game formats) did not leverage them to wreck mine so maybe you'll be fine too.
longstanding question about guns in D&D - my experiences no need to worry too much. I have had gunpowder crop up in two campaigns so far - Spelljammer Light of Xaryxis and Hexcrawl25 Realm of the Reluctant King - and in neither did it wreck the campaign.
First and most simply - one of the party was a musket armed Giff in the Spelljammer game and they played the part of a sniper par excellence - but no moreso than the long-bow wielding elf I adventured alongside in Out of the Abyss. Campaign took place in wildspace/on planets and in any case I was playing the campaign as written so no phlogiston nor the ignition risk of gunpowder associated with that. All in all, it was wholly a flavour thing beyond one trap made out of gunpowder barrels.
The players even made fairly large scale anti-shipping contraptions they launched with some spiky trap things included but never tried to acquire or incorporate gunpowder for whatever reasons.
In the second campaign - the Hexcrawl25 game - gunpowder had a lot more of a place but still did not break the game or ruin the flavour. It was introduced somewhat as an accident because I had resolved to try and use as much of Knock#1 as possible in that campaign and so when they searched the back rooms of a tavern unexpectedly I decided the '20 Gunpowders' table could be fun and it went from there.
The first thing they found was a heap of 'dragonpowder' - magical thermite essentially that "a wizard left there" which they stuffed into a bag and scarpered with. Afterwards I used a usage dice system to track depletion for their rather random use of it. It came in very handy for venturing through an insectfolk labyrinth where they used it to burn open some vaults.
With the knowledge that in-world there were such things, they took themselves to a goblin-market and traded various battlefield lootings for some more explosive powders - a handful of vials of saintsbone and a pouch of organic goblins-own gunpowder that could theoretically be self-replenishing. After this they took themselves off to commission a shotgun/blunderbus type weapon for the dwarf and after that considered themselves ready. These were a few mini-quests over a series of sessions as they were traipsing too and fro across the hexmap so I considered those things well earned.
Their final set up was for the dwarf to have the shotgun with their small squire riding on their shoulder and serving as a loader in fights. They also put a saddle-horn type mount for the gun on the top of their big lizard beast of burden so that the two small minions could operate it from beast-back while everyone else dismounted to fight on foot.
In the end, it never came into play as a game-breaking thing - it let the dwarf fighter participate in fights at range alongside the sorcerer and artificer - at about the same level of effectivenss which I could live with. Often at close quarters the noise of using the shotgun stopped it from being a 'first strike' weapon and the party as a whole leaned more on magic.
The funny thing is that these gunpowders came into play at the climax of each of the dungeons in Knock#1:
- In Citadel of Evil a batch of dragonpowder bundled to a vial of alchemists fire was catapulted into the main stairwell and set off an inferno that both torched out the top floors of the castle but also cut off the main villains line of retreat.
- In Praise the Fallen the main villain was about to teleport away on their initiative when the herbalist-themed artificer catapulted a bundle of all the saintsbone at their feet for great fistfuls of damage dice. This also threw some damage on most of the party and deafened them but it did succeed in over-killing the villain before they could flee
- In Zaratazarat's Manse when they found the mysterious monster-spawning slab they dumped most of their remaining dragonpowder onto it to burn through the slab while they fought the rest of the things around them. If I recall correctly some poor unfortunate bullywug or locathah spawned onto the table in the middle of that inferno and did not have a fun time either.
Otherwise, the dragonpowder saw the most use for burning through things and general destruction and mayhem against non-moving foes or other obstructions. Weirdly, they also decided during one significant night carousing to try inhaling dragonpowder and some more rolls on the goblin activity table established it to be a fairly effective hang-over cure.
There was two other notable uses of explosives throughout the campaign - first to cover a prison escape and second to collapse a doorway with hostiles on the far side.
The prison escape hinged off roping in some dwarven artificers who were part of the group being rescued to set up the trigger mechanisms to turn the explosives the players could supply into the time-delayed inferno they needed. I was pretty happy with this, as it was a pretty cunning plan overall relying on a pushing a rigged mine-cart onto a lift to the enemy camp above and then running like hell. The challenge for the players was not trivialised by the availability of explosives, so all to the good.
The door collapse was during the final session - while fighting thralls in "The Aboleths Dream" by Elven Tower the party had wedged the door leading into room seven while they fought other thralls. More thralls gathered from room(s) eight to bash down the door and had splintered it open Shining style when one of the party Catapults a bundle of vials of explosives wrapped around an alchemists fire. Big kaboom, bought them time to run off, and on their exit up stairs one they touched off the last of their gunpowder to shatter the entrance and let them get away.
In two separate campaigns the players never really went all-in on the potential of having access to explosives - except for the above 'big boss killer' moments. We were not seeing land-mine equivalents, doors being blown off hinges, explosives rolled into enemy strong points or similar item-focussed problem solving.
To mirror this, I did not lean heavily into explosives being in the hands of adversaries - the RAW magical ranged attacks of Astral Elves in the Light of Xaryxis campaign were sufficient for them. For the hexcrawl, the two major groups of adversaries so far have been mobs of cultists ambushed in tunnels and great beasts fought out in the open, neither of which have been made boring by the dwarf having a shotgun. The tunnel fights had a big element of sneaking about to not draw down the rest of the dungeon which kept things interesting. The big beasts were generally big enough that even a shotgun was not going to cut much mustard.
The main lesson I took from all this was that the gamebreaking potential of low-rate of fire weapons is overstated - the magical fire-power of standard classes of characters is equivalent, if not better. I cannot promise if you throw in some odd explosives for flavour, your players won't wreck your campaign but two completely different sets of players (different ages, nationalities, game formats) did not leverage them to wreck mine so maybe you'll be fine too.
13 May 2026
Art of adventure threading for campaigns
I poked one of the mainstay DM's of our local game society for their top tips on how to stitch scattered adventures together to make a campaign:
- Conservation of NPCs
- Tweak the adventures to fit the theme
- Work in meaningful player choices with meaningful consequences to the ongoing story
You can also consider these for any campaign you may be writing yourself or elements to watch for in written campaigns too.
Why think about stitching adventures together?
In short, to give yourself more options than the two dozen or so famous campaigns.
After the dozen or so 5e campaigns from WotC, the hivemind of the web recommends about another dozen 3rd party campaigns. You can delve into the past for yet more but sometimes even then you cannot find quite the thing you are looking for. There are also loosely tied anthology adventures, Adventurers Guild seasons, old Dungeon magazines and other sources that you might find that fit the campaign you want to run. There is a mass of creativity out there - fit to every flavour and preference of table - but assembling them all into something coherent can be a challenge.
Making the various sessions of your campaign feel coherent is also a base requirement to make it feel like more than just random events happening one after another.
Players like their knowledge to count, so repeatedly encountering the same NPCs allows what they have learned about those NPCs to be relevant and useful. "The Baron hates cats? How about for that distraction we need, let us set a half dozen cats lose at his coronation."
Working in meaningful choices with consequences actualises player agency - their decisions mattered and continued to matter over multiple sessions.
All these things are basic elements of making a good campaign but they are particularly important at the connecting edges of different escapades. Assuming that a given adventure is decent in and of itself, the trick is to make it feel like part of a coherent whole.
Stitching campaigns together from multiple adventures
The trick of campaign threading has been well deployed locally in our gaming group - both 'pre-threaded' connected Adventurers League adventures and through connecting independent adventures.
One comrade at RPGVienna ran a very nifty campaign based on the Storm Kings Thunder adventurers league season - the low-level cycle around Parnast. Over a bunch of Friday nights we got to Parnast, ran a bunch of quests around it then successfully defended the village from siege with the help of allies gathered in the previous adventures. It was perhaps eight sessions or so but it was a great, highly thematic campaign.
There was also a Ravnica mini-campaign built around the 'Secrets of the Triseklion' adventures bulked out with other appropriate adventures. Both of these were proper campaigns in my eye for having consequences to an over-arching sequence of events carrying over sessions - compared to my own Brancalonia games which had consequences but were otherwise fairly episodic, not really a coherent campaign.
The Storm Kings Thunder series were pre-threaded; written with recurring NPCs and as part of an over-arching sequence of events - but the Ravnica campaign was bulked out beyond the core adventures and needed to be reworked to be coherent. As mentioned above this meant:
- Conservation of NPCs
- Tweaking the adventures to fit the theme
- Having player choices with meaningful consequences
- Conservation of NPCs
We have mention conservation of NPCs before - just make similar NPCs be the same person. This can be expanded to have similar 'table function' NPCs be the same person - traders, quest-givers, etc. - where they have the same interaction with the characters, even if quite different as written.
I retained this in the Brancalonia campaign - but the impact was significantly lessened because the rotating cast of players meant that a given NPC appeared much less frequently to any one player so they did not reach the same level of 'that guy' recognisability.
- Tweaking the adventures to fit the theme
Here we have the work of identifying what fits within a campaign style - what can be easily repainted to lie seamlessly with other parts - and how to bulk out a set of adventures with others that were not immediately coherent or that provide options you need.
The first trick here is recognising that while any adventure can be made to fit into a campaign with enough elbow-grease, some are a lot easier to meld together than others. Terrain is a typical common factor to take but an adversary or location could also be used depending on the theme of the campaign - what is the key part of your campaign. If a common adversary, then that same foe on different terrains could be potentially useful. If a type of play - mountain traversal, ship voyages, urban investigations - then those are the factors you want to seek out.
Often this can be a thing that takes some work - an adventure might be set on a ship but make essentially no reference to that beyond the floorplan shape - so identifying whether an adventure truly contains the factors you want can be somewhat tiresome.
The other side of this coin is figuring out where you have a gap to be filled among the adventures you already have - typically done by using level progression for a first estimate but it can also be linked to state of the campaign - you might need some artic wilderness adventure to serve for if the party decides to trek to a given location rather than taking some other route.
If you can get your hands on a good review archive that helps you determine a) what is good and b) what adventures have what elements within them those are great tools for identifying good starting points to start finishing things.
- Having player choices with meaningful consequences
With pre-threaded adventures this is already done by the writers (one hopes) but in assembling disparate adventures the achievements and consequences of one ought to knock on to subsequent adventures beyond just levelling up.
Note, one or two isolated adventures can be fine as a change of pace or palate cleanser but, to make it feel like the adventures are part of a coherent whole, there ought to be decisions to make and consequences that come from those.
This one is hard to generalise because the decisions to be made are heavily dependent on the individual adventures. How the consequences of those decisions ripple through the rest of the campaign will be reliant on the nature of that campaign. The main lens I can suggest is to note what factions and foes make gains or suffer losses during an adventure and how, then consider how those will affect other things later - even if only through rumours and tales in taverns later on. Other elements like destruction of sites or establishment of new ones can also be big markers of consequence.
Plan to test
I will be trying these principles out with the old Dungeon Magazine Spelljammer adventures and will write up how those go. I had the great good fortune to find a copy of 'Under the Dark Fist' being sold by someone apparently divesting themselves of their whole D&D collection (!) and so I may even try and work in some of the official materials too.
- Conservation of NPCs
- Tweak the adventures to fit the theme
- Work in meaningful player choices with meaningful consequences to the ongoing story
You can also consider these for any campaign you may be writing yourself or elements to watch for in written campaigns too.
Why think about stitching adventures together?
In short, to give yourself more options than the two dozen or so famous campaigns.
After the dozen or so 5e campaigns from WotC, the hivemind of the web recommends about another dozen 3rd party campaigns. You can delve into the past for yet more but sometimes even then you cannot find quite the thing you are looking for. There are also loosely tied anthology adventures, Adventurers Guild seasons, old Dungeon magazines and other sources that you might find that fit the campaign you want to run. There is a mass of creativity out there - fit to every flavour and preference of table - but assembling them all into something coherent can be a challenge.
Making the various sessions of your campaign feel coherent is also a base requirement to make it feel like more than just random events happening one after another.
Players like their knowledge to count, so repeatedly encountering the same NPCs allows what they have learned about those NPCs to be relevant and useful. "The Baron hates cats? How about for that distraction we need, let us set a half dozen cats lose at his coronation."
Working in meaningful choices with consequences actualises player agency - their decisions mattered and continued to matter over multiple sessions.
All these things are basic elements of making a good campaign but they are particularly important at the connecting edges of different escapades. Assuming that a given adventure is decent in and of itself, the trick is to make it feel like part of a coherent whole.
Stitching campaigns together from multiple adventures
The trick of campaign threading has been well deployed locally in our gaming group - both 'pre-threaded' connected Adventurers League adventures and through connecting independent adventures.
One comrade at RPGVienna ran a very nifty campaign based on the Storm Kings Thunder adventurers league season - the low-level cycle around Parnast. Over a bunch of Friday nights we got to Parnast, ran a bunch of quests around it then successfully defended the village from siege with the help of allies gathered in the previous adventures. It was perhaps eight sessions or so but it was a great, highly thematic campaign.
There was also a Ravnica mini-campaign built around the 'Secrets of the Triseklion' adventures bulked out with other appropriate adventures. Both of these were proper campaigns in my eye for having consequences to an over-arching sequence of events carrying over sessions - compared to my own Brancalonia games which had consequences but were otherwise fairly episodic, not really a coherent campaign.
The Storm Kings Thunder series were pre-threaded; written with recurring NPCs and as part of an over-arching sequence of events - but the Ravnica campaign was bulked out beyond the core adventures and needed to be reworked to be coherent. As mentioned above this meant:
- Conservation of NPCs
- Tweaking the adventures to fit the theme
- Having player choices with meaningful consequences
- Conservation of NPCs
We have mention conservation of NPCs before - just make similar NPCs be the same person. This can be expanded to have similar 'table function' NPCs be the same person - traders, quest-givers, etc. - where they have the same interaction with the characters, even if quite different as written.
I retained this in the Brancalonia campaign - but the impact was significantly lessened because the rotating cast of players meant that a given NPC appeared much less frequently to any one player so they did not reach the same level of 'that guy' recognisability.
- Tweaking the adventures to fit the theme
Here we have the work of identifying what fits within a campaign style - what can be easily repainted to lie seamlessly with other parts - and how to bulk out a set of adventures with others that were not immediately coherent or that provide options you need.
The first trick here is recognising that while any adventure can be made to fit into a campaign with enough elbow-grease, some are a lot easier to meld together than others. Terrain is a typical common factor to take but an adversary or location could also be used depending on the theme of the campaign - what is the key part of your campaign. If a common adversary, then that same foe on different terrains could be potentially useful. If a type of play - mountain traversal, ship voyages, urban investigations - then those are the factors you want to seek out.
Often this can be a thing that takes some work - an adventure might be set on a ship but make essentially no reference to that beyond the floorplan shape - so identifying whether an adventure truly contains the factors you want can be somewhat tiresome.
The other side of this coin is figuring out where you have a gap to be filled among the adventures you already have - typically done by using level progression for a first estimate but it can also be linked to state of the campaign - you might need some artic wilderness adventure to serve for if the party decides to trek to a given location rather than taking some other route.
If you can get your hands on a good review archive that helps you determine a) what is good and b) what adventures have what elements within them those are great tools for identifying good starting points to start finishing things.
- Having player choices with meaningful consequences
With pre-threaded adventures this is already done by the writers (one hopes) but in assembling disparate adventures the achievements and consequences of one ought to knock on to subsequent adventures beyond just levelling up.
Note, one or two isolated adventures can be fine as a change of pace or palate cleanser but, to make it feel like the adventures are part of a coherent whole, there ought to be decisions to make and consequences that come from those.
This one is hard to generalise because the decisions to be made are heavily dependent on the individual adventures. How the consequences of those decisions ripple through the rest of the campaign will be reliant on the nature of that campaign. The main lens I can suggest is to note what factions and foes make gains or suffer losses during an adventure and how, then consider how those will affect other things later - even if only through rumours and tales in taverns later on. Other elements like destruction of sites or establishment of new ones can also be big markers of consequence.
Plan to test
I will be trying these principles out with the old Dungeon Magazine Spelljammer adventures and will write up how those go. I had the great good fortune to find a copy of 'Under the Dark Fist' being sold by someone apparently divesting themselves of their whole D&D collection (!) and so I may even try and work in some of the official materials too.
15 April 2026
Mapwork in campaigns (Maps Blogwagon)
tl;dr: get a broad coarse view of your world; there are easy tools to use & you will not regret it when your players head for the horizons.
This is for the Maps Blogwagon from Prismatic Wasteland. This is a paean to leveraging randomly generated or procedurally generated maps to get a rough but broad picture of everything. Dice this up, roll them up with various tools - or create them with intentionality - to get yourself a rough a broad rough cut of everything but only detail what you need. For that broad, shallow view Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator is great - it randomly blocks out a map with a couple of useful layers; cultures, biomes, national boundaries, and religions which interplay to give interesting results. Zoom down to cities and do the same with Watabou City Generator. This is to have a DM side tool to help you be coherent and consistent in your responses to questions from players. In particular when the player's geographic reach massively expands through access to high-level magics. When players start heading for the horizons, having a coarse, broad assessment of what is going on keeps you calm, helps you stay consistent and keeps the players immersed.
Ducal House Example
i wanted to talk about handling maps for the Ducal house game this is one just shy of 150 sessions. There are two big files - "Stats" the giant Excel with all of my world-building rules of thumb and math and demographic math and everything, and a giant PowerPoint called Maps, currently running at 96 slides. Here is where I stuffed all my map work. The original map for the game was done with Azgaar's fantasy maps and after that I took screenshots of various locales using different features to focus in on what was the actual play space.
This file has grown organically through the campaign, initially because there was a strong virtual component to play during the pandemic lock-down but now simply as it is the central reference for (complex) geography. I use this to figure things out then extract the relevant snippets I need for a session - either resketching the hexmap section or just working up a quick sites-and-connectors point-crawl-like schematic for travel.
Going back over it for writing this I am amused that the eras of the campaign are visible, like rings in a tree, as things were added as they became relevant.
Below I run through
1. Content of the maps file
2. Early game: city scale
3. Expanding to regional travel
4. Realms beyond
5. Sum up
This is for the Maps Blogwagon from Prismatic Wasteland. This is a paean to leveraging randomly generated or procedurally generated maps to get a rough but broad picture of everything. Dice this up, roll them up with various tools - or create them with intentionality - to get yourself a rough a broad rough cut of everything but only detail what you need. For that broad, shallow view Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator is great - it randomly blocks out a map with a couple of useful layers; cultures, biomes, national boundaries, and religions which interplay to give interesting results. Zoom down to cities and do the same with Watabou City Generator. This is to have a DM side tool to help you be coherent and consistent in your responses to questions from players. In particular when the player's geographic reach massively expands through access to high-level magics. When players start heading for the horizons, having a coarse, broad assessment of what is going on keeps you calm, helps you stay consistent and keeps the players immersed.
Ducal House Example
i wanted to talk about handling maps for the Ducal house game this is one just shy of 150 sessions. There are two big files - "Stats" the giant Excel with all of my world-building rules of thumb and math and demographic math and everything, and a giant PowerPoint called Maps, currently running at 96 slides. Here is where I stuffed all my map work. The original map for the game was done with Azgaar's fantasy maps and after that I took screenshots of various locales using different features to focus in on what was the actual play space.
This file has grown organically through the campaign, initially because there was a strong virtual component to play during the pandemic lock-down but now simply as it is the central reference for (complex) geography. I use this to figure things out then extract the relevant snippets I need for a session - either resketching the hexmap section or just working up a quick sites-and-connectors point-crawl-like schematic for travel.
Going back over it for writing this I am amused that the eras of the campaign are visible, like rings in a tree, as things were added as they became relevant.
Below I run through
1. Content of the maps file
2. Early game: city scale
3. Expanding to regional travel
4. Realms beyond
5. Sum up
25 March 2026
Flatpack cardboard monsters
I was futzing about with the smallest householder using up cardboard that had come with furniture and stumbled upon correctly scaled dinosaurs standees. Needless to say, this is not the work of Michaelangelo but it shows the concept.
This was ten minutes work with a box cutter, a piece of toilet-roll and a chunk of packing cardboard so relatively little effort. The dinosaur was sketched on from a google-search image. Getting the scale right for 28mm minis was complete coincidence in this case but it then struck me once I saw it as a decent idea to do deliberately.
The toilet-roll to be its torso has serendipitously made it pretty robust. He was supposed to have a second set of 'feet' (another carboard cross) but he was grabbed off the desk and put into service before that bit got done and he stands up well enough with just one. In addition, it slots together and comes apart easily and repeatably so it could be a handy way to have big monsters available for use without hauling around back-breaking amounts of kit.
I started with standees long ago and there are many clever standee sets kicking about - Kala Mandala just made a nice set available - but I think there could be some mileage in some sort of print-and-stick sets which you could use to make big monsters like this that easily break down where necessary.
Order of the Stick had some cunning paper minis in their 'A Monster For Every Season' sets - where the mounts had flat bits you could put a rider on. There is probably a cunning angle here for making the 'support' bit a flat cross piece doubles up as the space for riders.
My primary paper-crafts client is going to be just looking for more dinosaurs, not more cunning designs so I may not get to try this out myself - would love to hear anyone elses versions of big card monster minis and how to do them.
Order of the Stick had some cunning paper minis in their 'A Monster For Every Season' sets - where the mounts had flat bits you could put a rider on. There is probably a cunning angle here for making the 'support' bit a flat cross piece doubles up as the space for riders.
My primary paper-crafts client is going to be just looking for more dinosaurs, not more cunning designs so I may not get to try this out myself - would love to hear anyone elses versions of big card monster minis and how to do them.
11 March 2026
Ducal House - Year Seven Begins
This is being written as we cruise up on the second child-related campaign hiatus - it is a good sign that the campaign has survived one so far and that interest exists to continue with it post-hiatus.
The stats are becoming quite impressive
Running March-2020 to present
149 sessions held (150 including session zero)
663 hours played
Averaging two sessions a month tempo.
Levelled up 10 times
Big things done this year was the closing down of one major threat to the world - the reemergence of the dead god of the undead - by tracking down a last extant artefact, slaying his last true believer with it and flinging the parts into the vauls of a mountain fortress. This puts paid to a plot running since session two, and the blow fell in session 138 so a mere 136 sessions to resolve it, with some detours along the way.
The big shift this past year was accelerating the in-world clock; getting more relaxed about time passing. This paid off in us getting nearly a whole month done in ~ 30 sessions roughly a session a day, twice as fast as in previous years. We all agreed to try this and it seems to be paying off.
Statistics
Sessions per month varied over the year - quite a lot early in the year while bearing down on the artefact and then slower in the back half of the year - averaging the twice monthly tempo that was the initial target. I must once again recommend this sanity preserving technique for DMs - commit to a tempo that is slower than you would love, and then see if you can get a bonus session here or there. Those sessions will feel like treats as opposed to trying to keep a high tempo, having life-driven cancellations, and have the same number of sessions feel like thin gruel.
December last year was also the point where the actual hours and the theoretical plan finally crossed over. That plan - a pair of five hours sessions, ten hours of gaming, per month - was wildly ambitious for a sustained campaign but lo, we got six years in before we've fallen under that target. Admittedly, we have been burning down a massive pandemic-lock-in bank of hours played but still, we are only now falling behind where I might have hoped to be.
There was no level up this year - it was spent at 11th level throughout. They are creeping up on 12th level, one more good fight and they will probably get there. Average session length has ticked down this past year; 3.3 hrs versus 4.1 hrs the year before and 4.6 hrs for the campaign to date. We put in a fair few more evening sessions in person this last year which were good for keeping tempo up but those slots are just shorter by their nature.
As mentioned above after a wedge of combat XP while closing in on the artefact, things have been a lot lower risk of late. It needs one more significant fight - though one thing that is slowing things down a chunk is the inclusion of a fairly heavyweight high-CR follower in the party of late which has been diluting everyones combat XP gains.
As mentioned above, very happy to see the steepening of the time passing in-world; hopefully we can keep up this in-world tempo as it makes it more plausible for in-world consequences to propagate, both good and bad.
Plot progression
To recap the party's actual doings in world - things opened with a raid on an infernal ceremony, a desperate noble seeking to restore his families fortune, then progressed through repatriation of rescuees from a githyanki raid on the astral, and some setting the realm in order before they departed for a raid over the mountains into the chaotic warzone of their western neighbour, under invasion by their northern neighbout. Awakened ancient monsters, undead legions, wolf-riding hordes and local militias all clashed in the lands where a god had once died. After a side-trek to sneak into the lair of the stone giants lich-king for reconnaisance, the party scoured these war torn lands until they found the ruins of the ancient capital, snuck in, fought their way out past a swarm of demons and undead and fled with the blade of that long-dead god.
After a brief respite at the beach, the blade was used to slay that gods last true believer, then flung in the deepest, darkest vault in the family holdings. A diversion to the moon was followed by some house duties to supervise the removal of a deadly legacy from a buried temple of Bain beneath the capital, followed by an ambush by a third party in those same undercity catacombs. Finally, after tense discussions with their lieges court mage and realising they hunted the same foes, the year closed with a tour of the trouble spots, gathering the freshest of news by flexing the sorcerers teleportation capabilities.
The background goal to all this has been gearing up to put a stop to the second threat-to-all-life they are aware of, the stone-giants lich-king and whatever dread works he is up to.
Look ahead
We were to have a session tonight, before the campaign went on hiatus once more but now smallest householders enthusiasm for fresh air put paid to those plans. Last time it took us six months to get back to playing; we shall hope for similar this time around, so maybe some more sessions in August? We shall see.
Resolving the threat this lich-king poses is the main goal the players are aiming for at the moment, most likely that will carry us through to the end of the calendar year and after that there are a million loose threads lying around, up to them what they chose to prioritise but I think there is still enough meat on the bone for us to continue at least another year. For now, that is good enough, the year after I will deal with as we get to it!
The stats are becoming quite impressive
Running March-2020 to present
149 sessions held (150 including session zero)
663 hours played
Averaging two sessions a month tempo.
Levelled up 10 times
Big things done this year was the closing down of one major threat to the world - the reemergence of the dead god of the undead - by tracking down a last extant artefact, slaying his last true believer with it and flinging the parts into the vauls of a mountain fortress. This puts paid to a plot running since session two, and the blow fell in session 138 so a mere 136 sessions to resolve it, with some detours along the way.
The big shift this past year was accelerating the in-world clock; getting more relaxed about time passing. This paid off in us getting nearly a whole month done in ~ 30 sessions roughly a session a day, twice as fast as in previous years. We all agreed to try this and it seems to be paying off.
The Sorcerer, as drawn by the Bard
As ever, XP is a flat 200 per session and then whatever comes from combat and risk-taking. There were a few big fights while questing around trying to find the artefact which pushed the total nicely but since then, apart from one ambush by rivals, there has been a lot of inteligence gathering and set up for a run on the next known hazard-to-all-life so a slower tick up of XP.Statistics
Sessions per month varied over the year - quite a lot early in the year while bearing down on the artefact and then slower in the back half of the year - averaging the twice monthly tempo that was the initial target. I must once again recommend this sanity preserving technique for DMs - commit to a tempo that is slower than you would love, and then see if you can get a bonus session here or there. Those sessions will feel like treats as opposed to trying to keep a high tempo, having life-driven cancellations, and have the same number of sessions feel like thin gruel.
December last year was also the point where the actual hours and the theoretical plan finally crossed over. That plan - a pair of five hours sessions, ten hours of gaming, per month - was wildly ambitious for a sustained campaign but lo, we got six years in before we've fallen under that target. Admittedly, we have been burning down a massive pandemic-lock-in bank of hours played but still, we are only now falling behind where I might have hoped to be.
Plot progression
To recap the party's actual doings in world - things opened with a raid on an infernal ceremony, a desperate noble seeking to restore his families fortune, then progressed through repatriation of rescuees from a githyanki raid on the astral, and some setting the realm in order before they departed for a raid over the mountains into the chaotic warzone of their western neighbour, under invasion by their northern neighbout. Awakened ancient monsters, undead legions, wolf-riding hordes and local militias all clashed in the lands where a god had once died. After a side-trek to sneak into the lair of the stone giants lich-king for reconnaisance, the party scoured these war torn lands until they found the ruins of the ancient capital, snuck in, fought their way out past a swarm of demons and undead and fled with the blade of that long-dead god.
After a brief respite at the beach, the blade was used to slay that gods last true believer, then flung in the deepest, darkest vault in the family holdings. A diversion to the moon was followed by some house duties to supervise the removal of a deadly legacy from a buried temple of Bain beneath the capital, followed by an ambush by a third party in those same undercity catacombs. Finally, after tense discussions with their lieges court mage and realising they hunted the same foes, the year closed with a tour of the trouble spots, gathering the freshest of news by flexing the sorcerers teleportation capabilities.
The background goal to all this has been gearing up to put a stop to the second threat-to-all-life they are aware of, the stone-giants lich-king and whatever dread works he is up to.
Look ahead
We were to have a session tonight, before the campaign went on hiatus once more but now smallest householders enthusiasm for fresh air put paid to those plans. Last time it took us six months to get back to playing; we shall hope for similar this time around, so maybe some more sessions in August? We shall see.
Resolving the threat this lich-king poses is the main goal the players are aiming for at the moment, most likely that will carry us through to the end of the calendar year and after that there are a million loose threads lying around, up to them what they chose to prioritise but I think there is still enough meat on the bone for us to continue at least another year. For now, that is good enough, the year after I will deal with as we get to it!
25 February 2026
Wrapping a campaign on time
With an upcoming campaign end in sight, I am looking at how to wrap things up for my Hexcrawl25 campaign. The fact that it is still going into 2026 is a nice fillip but with a small householder on the way, better to tie things off than have it hanging over me.
I had a rummage around for wisdom on the web and DungeonFruit has some good ideas - but in a 'you should have started way back there' too-late-now sense. Dungeonfruit talks about "setting up your end condition" in Beginning Of The End (How To Finish A Campaign). Alas I am going almost perfectly against their advice and going with a real-world time limit - there is not an ticking clock hanging over the campaign, it was always about the party chasing after their own goals; a pure sandbox.
Beginning the wrap up
This means we are looking to align the end of campaign with players accomplishing their goals, not any particular big plot of mine. I told them the time they had left two sessions back and to think what they wanted to get achieved in that time. This is throwing the responsibility to manage their time on the players, which is fully in line with how the campaign has been running so far - they set the tempo, they go where they like, I run the world they are poking about in.
Throughout the campaign we have periodically been using the Ultimate RPG Campfire Card Deck and that has revealed or crystallised quite a few player chosen goals. I have catalogued them as they had come up - some have resolved, others are beyond the scope of the campaign but still some remain that could be achieved. Thus in the absence of an over-arching plot I will aim to let the PC's threads come to a resolution.
Personal quests folk had picked (and succeeded)
- found the Kingdom of Ashley, rescue and install the 'king' (collective)
- get a giant spider mount (the dwarf warrior)
- become reknowned (the 'wizard')
- create their own herbarium (the 'herbalist')
Open plots at time of trying to set up the finale
- meet their destined true love, as foreseen by a seer they met in a deep mine (the tundra barbarian)
- finish clearing out the local cult lair (collective)
Plan to the end
At this point this means that I am going to budget my time as getting one big quest done per session - maybe we will achieve more but going by prior rate of questing, probably not. So with a session filled by them finishing out the dungeon delve/cult clearance they are currently embarked upon that leaves three for resolving the 'destined true love' hook - which should be fine. The in-house testing team helped me figure out how to time it all, I know what elements I need to have to hand, the rest just runs off the hexmap.
Note, in between writing the first draft of this and now completing it, the party continued to clear out the cult lair they had been camped at - and are now easily a half session remaining before they are done and have taken some fairly heavy blows along the way. I am going to have to adjust my timeline from here - there may be a rest period, or reluctance to get stuck into further heroics? We shall see.
I think what I need to do is to set up multiple smaller elements - resolvable within a half session or so - and then keep/drop some as the time runs down, so the final session can be a reasonable declaration of victory, wherever they get to. Assuming they do not TPK along the way, which remains a possibility.
The one big thing I am taking from Dungeonfruit is to leave time for 'wrap up' and/or epilogue - I will give each of the players some running room to say how things turn out in the aftermath of all their deed - but I need to remember to leave that time and bring things to a close a little early on that last night.
I had a rummage around for wisdom on the web and DungeonFruit has some good ideas - but in a 'you should have started way back there' too-late-now sense. Dungeonfruit talks about "setting up your end condition" in Beginning Of The End (How To Finish A Campaign). Alas I am going almost perfectly against their advice and going with a real-world time limit - there is not an ticking clock hanging over the campaign, it was always about the party chasing after their own goals; a pure sandbox.
Beginning the wrap up
This means we are looking to align the end of campaign with players accomplishing their goals, not any particular big plot of mine. I told them the time they had left two sessions back and to think what they wanted to get achieved in that time. This is throwing the responsibility to manage their time on the players, which is fully in line with how the campaign has been running so far - they set the tempo, they go where they like, I run the world they are poking about in.
Throughout the campaign we have periodically been using the Ultimate RPG Campfire Card Deck and that has revealed or crystallised quite a few player chosen goals. I have catalogued them as they had come up - some have resolved, others are beyond the scope of the campaign but still some remain that could be achieved. Thus in the absence of an over-arching plot I will aim to let the PC's threads come to a resolution.
Personal quests folk had picked (and succeeded)
- found the Kingdom of Ashley, rescue and install the 'king' (collective)
- get a giant spider mount (the dwarf warrior)
- become reknowned (the 'wizard')
- create their own herbarium (the 'herbalist')
Open plots at time of trying to set up the finale
- meet their destined true love, as foreseen by a seer they met in a deep mine (the tundra barbarian)
- finish clearing out the local cult lair (collective)
Plan to the end
At this point this means that I am going to budget my time as getting one big quest done per session - maybe we will achieve more but going by prior rate of questing, probably not. So with a session filled by them finishing out the dungeon delve/cult clearance they are currently embarked upon that leaves three for resolving the 'destined true love' hook - which should be fine. The in-house testing team helped me figure out how to time it all, I know what elements I need to have to hand, the rest just runs off the hexmap.
Note, in between writing the first draft of this and now completing it, the party continued to clear out the cult lair they had been camped at - and are now easily a half session remaining before they are done and have taken some fairly heavy blows along the way. I am going to have to adjust my timeline from here - there may be a rest period, or reluctance to get stuck into further heroics? We shall see.
I think what I need to do is to set up multiple smaller elements - resolvable within a half session or so - and then keep/drop some as the time runs down, so the final session can be a reasonable declaration of victory, wherever they get to. Assuming they do not TPK along the way, which remains a possibility.
The one big thing I am taking from Dungeonfruit is to leave time for 'wrap up' and/or epilogue - I will give each of the players some running room to say how things turn out in the aftermath of all their deed - but I need to remember to leave that time and bring things to a close a little early on that last night.
21 February 2026
What xaosseed's games look like
Following up on Grace of Choir of Fire's idea of laying out how elf-games are played at specific tables so people can see the multitudes that throng beneath the umbrella of 'D&D' or even any sub-division below that.
This is broadly the set-up I came up with, with a fair chunk of 'host/hospitality' mixed in on top. My gaming set up has always had 'home' and 'away' set ups based on how much junk I was willing to haul around. Minis, battlemats and other bits of big hardware were never my thing even when I was home because I ran free-wheeling 'do what you please' games so I was not putting up with the constraints of not having the right minis - we just did theater of the mind and tokens/meeples as needed.
Home Campaign Rig
Ducal House (home campaign) is like a coelecanth; this is me running a 'perpetual campaign' in the grand old AD&D tradition I first learned.
- system is 3.5e
- three players, only play with all three; trying for twice a month, life oft gets in the way but we tend to overbook slots and accept some attrition.
- gather at my place (also shared with one of the players (in-house testing team)).
- three standard modes - morning start (1030), afternoon start (1300) or night slot (2130) which differ in that morning start will include a break for takeout and probably a stop for someone to go to their evening shift or a party. Afternoon slot has no big break, runs to exhaustion or child pickup time. Nightslot runs to exhaustion.
- set up is players on the couch; table stacked with snacks - grapes, dates, crisps, biscuits - plus a carafe of coffee (morning/afternoon) or herbal tea (night). I have my DM screen at the end of the table, set up behind that.
- We typically get in, chat for a bit - any news since last seen; usually just a week or fortnights worth.
- Sessions launch with the bard doing a recap from their notes then I do 'time, place, immediate activities' and then the players decide what they are doing.
This is broadly the set-up I came up with, with a fair chunk of 'host/hospitality' mixed in on top. My gaming set up has always had 'home' and 'away' set ups based on how much junk I was willing to haul around. Minis, battlemats and other bits of big hardware were never my thing even when I was home because I ran free-wheeling 'do what you please' games so I was not putting up with the constraints of not having the right minis - we just did theater of the mind and tokens/meeples as needed.
Home Campaign Rig
Ducal House (home campaign) is like a coelecanth; this is me running a 'perpetual campaign' in the grand old AD&D tradition I first learned.
- system is 3.5e
- three players, only play with all three; trying for twice a month, life oft gets in the way but we tend to overbook slots and accept some attrition.
- gather at my place (also shared with one of the players (in-house testing team)).
- three standard modes - morning start (1030), afternoon start (1300) or night slot (2130) which differ in that morning start will include a break for takeout and probably a stop for someone to go to their evening shift or a party. Afternoon slot has no big break, runs to exhaustion or child pickup time. Nightslot runs to exhaustion.
- set up is players on the couch; table stacked with snacks - grapes, dates, crisps, biscuits - plus a carafe of coffee (morning/afternoon) or herbal tea (night). I have my DM screen at the end of the table, set up behind that.
- We typically get in, chat for a bit - any news since last seen; usually just a week or fortnights worth.
- Sessions launch with the bard doing a recap from their notes then I do 'time, place, immediate activities' and then the players decide what they are doing.
18 February 2026
Using dragons, fiends & other powerful beings (RPG Blog Carnival)
Sea of Stars proposes Dragons, Gods and other Powerful Beings for this months prompt for the RPG Blog Carnival. Inspiration for one big idea did not strike so I am going to do quick-answers to three of the prompts:
* "From the perspective of games mastering the world: how involved do you want these beings to be? They can easily overwhelm the player characters, so what level of involvement works for both you and the players?"
* "How involved do you want the players to be in creating religions, legends, rituals?"
* "Should characters be able to affect these powerful beings? Meet them? Or should they just be background elements in the setting?"
"From the perspective of games mastering the world: how involved do you want these beings to be? They can easily overwhelm the player characters, so what level of involvement works for both you and the players?"
Having extremely powerful beings active in the world can be a useful lever for a certain style of DM'ing. I have always liked worlds where there are some forces that clearly mightier than the PCs in play. For most of my early campaigns those were dragons to the point that players told me later their rule of thumb was "if we don't know where the dragon is, we just have not spotted it yet."
I realise I got a strong stylistic steer on how dragons should from the Wyrms of the Realms series in Dragon magazine which had the 'meddling shapeshifting high-powered dragon' as a staple. I had a stalking shadow dragon as one of the semi-antagonistic patrons if I recall correctly in the Katharsis campaign. Kraken Mesa had a very large old wyrm that lived in the treasure vault of the citadel they inherited.
There were also a number of high-power fiends kicking around in the Kraken Mesa campaign, also counting as that 'involved, near-overwhelmingly powerful being' category. I tended to use those entities as scenary who could talk - there was no point trying to defeat them, you avoided them or you figured out a way to navigate them - and you tended to be way smaller than their concerns so could slip beneath their notice.
I liked dragons, fiends and the like for that position in my campaigns and I was happy for the players to interact with them as puzzles because they were beyond being a combat challenge. Their presence set the tone of not every fight being balanced or one that players could win from the get-go.
"How involved do you want the players to be in creating religions, legends, rituals?"
I like players being involved - of late I greatly enjoyed the use I have gotten in-game from the Small Gods of the animalings - originating from a GLoGtober '22 prompt - and then getting reinforced by the notion of 'Who Hears Your Oath' variant of divine intervention mechanics.
This little framework has given players reasons to pray or seek blessings at sacred or fitting places and gives a chance for things to be listening or respond. So far one of the players in the Hexcrawl25 campaign has been busily developing ritual practice for They Who Hide From Sight, including invisible sacrifices, carving their sigil in hidden places and other such practices.
The spreading of legends in general is something that I like to encourage - in the Ducal House campaign, the Bard leans hard into that - seeding songs throughout the realm and using their rapid-travel capabilities to propagate the sagas they want known far and wide. In the Hexcrawl25 campaign, there was a time-shift and one of the few things they had done before dropping off the timeline for four years was set a bunch of rumours running about one of the party being a mighty wizard - four years has been plenty of time to percolate and now they are often recognised by name when they turn up places.
Similarly as a good anti-blorb doctrinaire, I am happy for players to tell me what rituals and legends might be out there where it is something that could reasonably be known by them - even better when it is something they can base off some other in-world facts or suppositions. Wild whole cloth additions to the world get a bit more of a flavour-check but it is rare that I cannot work an idea in.
"Should characters be able to affect these powerful beings? Meet them? Or should they just be background elements in the setting?"
As mentioned above I think of these powerful beings more or less like terrain - but a sea can be drained or a mountain torn down with enough effort and the right plan. Everything is affectable with enough effort. Meeting powerful beings or especially gods has always been a staple of my games - hiking up Mount Olympus to meet Mars, patron of two of the party, was one of the earliest divine encounters I ran I believe.
There is a fine old tradition in D&D of displacing gods and powerful beings which I can get behind in some circumstances but it is not a thing to treat trivially or else it makes the achievement hollow. To defeat a gods plans, to drive off its servitors - these are the things of epic deed already. To usurp a god and cast them down should be a huge deal, hard won - and creating and seeing that campaign that does such a thing justice through would be a hell of a lot of work.
* "From the perspective of games mastering the world: how involved do you want these beings to be? They can easily overwhelm the player characters, so what level of involvement works for both you and the players?"
* "How involved do you want the players to be in creating religions, legends, rituals?"
* "Should characters be able to affect these powerful beings? Meet them? Or should they just be background elements in the setting?"
"From the perspective of games mastering the world: how involved do you want these beings to be? They can easily overwhelm the player characters, so what level of involvement works for both you and the players?"
Having extremely powerful beings active in the world can be a useful lever for a certain style of DM'ing. I have always liked worlds where there are some forces that clearly mightier than the PCs in play. For most of my early campaigns those were dragons to the point that players told me later their rule of thumb was "if we don't know where the dragon is, we just have not spotted it yet."
I realise I got a strong stylistic steer on how dragons should from the Wyrms of the Realms series in Dragon magazine which had the 'meddling shapeshifting high-powered dragon' as a staple. I had a stalking shadow dragon as one of the semi-antagonistic patrons if I recall correctly in the Katharsis campaign. Kraken Mesa had a very large old wyrm that lived in the treasure vault of the citadel they inherited.
There were also a number of high-power fiends kicking around in the Kraken Mesa campaign, also counting as that 'involved, near-overwhelmingly powerful being' category. I tended to use those entities as scenary who could talk - there was no point trying to defeat them, you avoided them or you figured out a way to navigate them - and you tended to be way smaller than their concerns so could slip beneath their notice.
I liked dragons, fiends and the like for that position in my campaigns and I was happy for the players to interact with them as puzzles because they were beyond being a combat challenge. Their presence set the tone of not every fight being balanced or one that players could win from the get-go.
"How involved do you want the players to be in creating religions, legends, rituals?"
I like players being involved - of late I greatly enjoyed the use I have gotten in-game from the Small Gods of the animalings - originating from a GLoGtober '22 prompt - and then getting reinforced by the notion of 'Who Hears Your Oath' variant of divine intervention mechanics.
This little framework has given players reasons to pray or seek blessings at sacred or fitting places and gives a chance for things to be listening or respond. So far one of the players in the Hexcrawl25 campaign has been busily developing ritual practice for They Who Hide From Sight, including invisible sacrifices, carving their sigil in hidden places and other such practices.
The spreading of legends in general is something that I like to encourage - in the Ducal House campaign, the Bard leans hard into that - seeding songs throughout the realm and using their rapid-travel capabilities to propagate the sagas they want known far and wide. In the Hexcrawl25 campaign, there was a time-shift and one of the few things they had done before dropping off the timeline for four years was set a bunch of rumours running about one of the party being a mighty wizard - four years has been plenty of time to percolate and now they are often recognised by name when they turn up places.
Similarly as a good anti-blorb doctrinaire, I am happy for players to tell me what rituals and legends might be out there where it is something that could reasonably be known by them - even better when it is something they can base off some other in-world facts or suppositions. Wild whole cloth additions to the world get a bit more of a flavour-check but it is rare that I cannot work an idea in.
"Should characters be able to affect these powerful beings? Meet them? Or should they just be background elements in the setting?"
As mentioned above I think of these powerful beings more or less like terrain - but a sea can be drained or a mountain torn down with enough effort and the right plan. Everything is affectable with enough effort. Meeting powerful beings or especially gods has always been a staple of my games - hiking up Mount Olympus to meet Mars, patron of two of the party, was one of the earliest divine encounters I ran I believe.
There is a fine old tradition in D&D of displacing gods and powerful beings which I can get behind in some circumstances but it is not a thing to treat trivially or else it makes the achievement hollow. To defeat a gods plans, to drive off its servitors - these are the things of epic deed already. To usurp a god and cast them down should be a huge deal, hard won - and creating and seeing that campaign that does such a thing justice through would be a hell of a lot of work.
04 February 2026
Secret Information In Domain Games - Handle With Care
tl;dr: espionage and information warfare in domain games needs to be handled with care to avoid slowing the game and diminishing player agency.
A point raised in Infernal Pacts Cataphracts retrospective and I saw myself in Empyrean Dynasty - people getting inside other peoples information loops leaving a sour taste with players where they did not know those moves were possible.
Getting false information through from the GM feels bad because players did not know their information channel was lies - same problem with false hydras, red herrings, etc. - it requires very specifically invested players who love being paranoid about their information.
Typically players suspend disbelief to fully trust the imperfect channel that is DM comms and when that is revealed to be lies, then the reaction is "well what is the point?" It is often tricky enough to sweep together the clues and information about a setting to be able to make an in-world reasoned assessment of the situation that players are unenthusiastic to have to sift those clues and information for reliability from there.
Players have only so much attention in the first place for a game, if they did not sign up for an infowarfare or opsec-forward game, then that is just friction before they get to do what they want. I sign up for chess, I might be unhappy to be forced to play rounds of poker before every move. If the infowar game does not excite them, then you will never get to the strategy moves and the game is toast.
Twisted intel has its place, but it is a question to be carefully considered whether allowing one player to lean into that information-warfare layer in a domain game is clever play or will the other players (who are not aware this active information distortion may be happening) consider it changing the rules of the game without players assent.
The Empyrean Dynasty games were clear that information warfare was happening, which made it fine, though the cycles and subcycles of intercepts, precognitives, order revisions, further intercepts, etc. slowed later turns to a crawl - particularly where life happening further delayed the move-counter-moves - leading me to suggest again it is to be handled with care. Time-limits on orders can work.
I think it is essentially a question of PVP - some folk enjoy it, others do not, so being very clear on whether or not it is possible allows people to play with full agency and not end up feeling like near-NPCs in someone elses game.
If players only find out after that fact that there was a whole infowar pvp layer going on, they will feel stripped of their agency, low-level players in a high-level game, or that there is no point in acting because other players are inside their decision loop. Messing with player agency, is to be treated with extreme caution.
I am a big fan of 'the twist' over 'the red herring' - where a new piece of information puts existing information in new context - or a 'big reveal' which is high impact new information. For a masterfully done example, see "A campaign of baits and switches" from Zzarchov Kowolski. I find that you typically have un-equally distributed attention among players, through life intensity, committments, schedules, etc. some will have more capacity than others off the table and allowing those players to run rings around other players because they have time to do so is another thing to be treated with caution.
All told, I think secret information and the like is fine to have as long as it is a known quantity and either everyone is into that or there is some accomodation - players buddy up and one who can works up good information for both to act on - better than "too bad" for those without the inclination or wherewithal to play that layer of the game.
A point raised in Infernal Pacts Cataphracts retrospective and I saw myself in Empyrean Dynasty - people getting inside other peoples information loops leaving a sour taste with players where they did not know those moves were possible.
Getting false information through from the GM feels bad because players did not know their information channel was lies - same problem with false hydras, red herrings, etc. - it requires very specifically invested players who love being paranoid about their information.
Typically players suspend disbelief to fully trust the imperfect channel that is DM comms and when that is revealed to be lies, then the reaction is "well what is the point?" It is often tricky enough to sweep together the clues and information about a setting to be able to make an in-world reasoned assessment of the situation that players are unenthusiastic to have to sift those clues and information for reliability from there.
Players have only so much attention in the first place for a game, if they did not sign up for an infowarfare or opsec-forward game, then that is just friction before they get to do what they want. I sign up for chess, I might be unhappy to be forced to play rounds of poker before every move. If the infowar game does not excite them, then you will never get to the strategy moves and the game is toast.
Twisted intel has its place, but it is a question to be carefully considered whether allowing one player to lean into that information-warfare layer in a domain game is clever play or will the other players (who are not aware this active information distortion may be happening) consider it changing the rules of the game without players assent.
The Empyrean Dynasty games were clear that information warfare was happening, which made it fine, though the cycles and subcycles of intercepts, precognitives, order revisions, further intercepts, etc. slowed later turns to a crawl - particularly where life happening further delayed the move-counter-moves - leading me to suggest again it is to be handled with care. Time-limits on orders can work.
I think it is essentially a question of PVP - some folk enjoy it, others do not, so being very clear on whether or not it is possible allows people to play with full agency and not end up feeling like near-NPCs in someone elses game.
If players only find out after that fact that there was a whole infowar pvp layer going on, they will feel stripped of their agency, low-level players in a high-level game, or that there is no point in acting because other players are inside their decision loop. Messing with player agency, is to be treated with extreme caution.
I am a big fan of 'the twist' over 'the red herring' - where a new piece of information puts existing information in new context - or a 'big reveal' which is high impact new information. For a masterfully done example, see "A campaign of baits and switches" from Zzarchov Kowolski. I find that you typically have un-equally distributed attention among players, through life intensity, committments, schedules, etc. some will have more capacity than others off the table and allowing those players to run rings around other players because they have time to do so is another thing to be treated with caution.
All told, I think secret information and the like is fine to have as long as it is a known quantity and either everyone is into that or there is some accomodation - players buddy up and one who can works up good information for both to act on - better than "too bad" for those without the inclination or wherewithal to play that layer of the game.
24 January 2026
Community creation - getting that second DM, trying that other system.
Challenged by Trick the Giant to commemorate the founding and server-activation of the Vienna DM Supergroup with a post on the theme of Community - I was brainstorming what I could possibly add to the topic with the in-house testing team and they suggested talking about how in the group and era I started out, everyone was a DM and that this bumps just a gaming table up to a gaming community because it is not just hanging off one DMs effort and availability.
Half of the intention of the Supergroup was to create a game design community - and for thoughts on that I direct you to the excellent A Quick and Dirty Guide to Building a Local RPG Design Scene by Brackish Draught - their checklist of ideas maps almost perfectly to what we did and what worked.
The other half of the purpose of the Supergroup was giving forever-DM's a chance to play and that is more likely to be the more useful thing for more of you. We short-circuited this by gathering existing forever-GMs, but what about the case where you are the only one?
Why it matters
One DM and their table, no matter how large the roster, is just one gaming group and it thrives or fails based on fate allowing that DM to continue to run their games. It also has a ceiling for activity based on when that one DM gets saturated and needs to fit in other things like sleeping, work, etc.
Should that DM have to quit for whatever reason, then while you might have a circle of friends, with no DM you do not have a gaming community.
A community forms when the gaming is no longer dependent on any one person - when you have multiple DMs. What I often see, with the people who come to our open tables, is that people want to play and few decide to run their own games - maybe 1 in 6 people through the door DM even once over the year and that includes all our existing DM cohort. There seems to be an apprenticeship approach which takes a while. There seems to be a much more solid divide now between DM and players compared to when I started.
Every player a games-master
When I first got into things, pretty much everyone who played at any of the tables also ran something. This was the mid-90s so the games in play were AD&D, WoD in all its flavours, WHFRP, Dragonlance Saga system, Shadowrun, and Conspiracy X. Everyone had their own thing they ran, according to taste, and we rotated. It meant there was never a shortage of folk ready to run things, the load was much more evenly balanced and the group as a whole more resilient to any one person being away.
I think it was also beneficial because everyone got some time at the head of the table and so knew first hand about the challenges of marshalling a table of players, running a session, and all the various chores of a DM. Thus folk were easier players, less inclined to grief a DM as they had been there too.
I suspect that the range of systems we played also made folk a bit more relaxed about the DM not being the single source of truth, with others around the table checking rules and picking up minor tasks that would otherwise all be routed through the DM. This made everything quicker, cutting down dead time since some 'DM tasks' were being solved by the players.
Since everyone was less familiar with the systems, prior to the internet being universally available in the palm of your hand, there was a higher tolerance to things being 'good enough for now' - making a ruling in the moment and moving on. Min-maxing was less, since all systems were less familiar and any one exploit was more tolerable because you were not dealing with it all the time.
To be fair this also meant that any given campaign progressed more slowly because it was not the continual focus of a groups game time but this is a feature not a bug. Rapid progress in a campaign is not what we are optimising for with these ideas.
"Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
Samuel Becketts line is one of the things to hold as a north star in getting from just a one-DM gaming group to a gaming community. If everyone involved can get relaxed about trying new things and these things maybe being a bit squeaky but with the anticipation that together, everyone will get better, then you have the fertile ground where a community will grow.
There are greater online communities one can participate in, those are their own thing and not my field of expertise so I defer to the better advice of others. For your local table however, getting together an in-person or hybrid group - any one where there is a good chunk of in person meeting up - then I would suggest that those folk, your local micro-environment, is what you want to be adapting to. There is a torrent of advice and opinion online, a firehose that will occupy all your time if you attempt to take it all in - sip from the torrent, take what works usefully for your table and ignore the rest.
The best thing that can come from online sources - or more slowly through books - are ideas, pointers to possible ways - and being open to trying those things with an attitude of testing to see what works is helpful. That test-and-keep or test-and-drop attitude is a great one to have collectively; it both expands the range of sources from which you might draw that one great idea that makes your games better and makes everyone more forgiving for hiccups and rough bits in games where you are trying something new.
Having an attitude of 'try it and keep/dump' is great - openly acknowledging 'we are going to try these rules for a bit then decide if we like them' is good. It takes the pressure off any set of rules being flawless and lets you test how often game-breaking edge cases actually come up. If some marvelous exploit allows the PCs to massively succeed one time, that if probably fine, a great story - if it happens twice per session and is making the game hard to run - tweak or remove it.
People as a whole are much more willing to give things a go when it is a short-run thing - a new system for a one-shot or a short run campaign is a much easier sell than trying to get people to commit to a weekly slot for an indefinite amount of time. In particular when you are trying to wrangle a group of people, no time will work for everyone so rather than locking in on one time forever and losing some people, try things and then adjust.
Thoughts on community
In the same way that the 90s gamers when I came up were pretty omniverous the mid-2010s local lot here used to have an Indie games night where they ran different things every week. This, with a local board-game bar as the venue and a classic forum has formed the backbone of a community that has now been running for over a decade.
If you are trying to get a community off the ground, in particular if you are starting from a single gaming table, then intermixing your big stuff with one-shots gives a great opportunity for others to shine. Switch the main campaign from weekly to every fortnight and have others run something on the off week, or maybe last week of every month is a one-shot - something like that opens up slots for others to have a go under relatively controlled conditions.
Some folk who turn up will only want to play, some will only want to play 5e, this is fine but do not let them stop you. Geek Social Fallacies say 'friends do everything together' but if one person does not want to do a thing and you've got a potential fledgling DM ready to run something and help take that step up - ask the naysayer to go catch a movie that night. As the DM who is putting in all the elbow grease you get to make the calls that help you cultivate a back-up DM. Go forward with the willing if you have enough of them, do not waste your energy trying to get unanimity or convert the unwilling.
Getting your group on board in general with the goal of learning collectively - figuring out how to run the best games, ideally more folk running good games for each other - is a great attitude to have. It makes everyone a participant and responsible for the collective enjoyment. When folk are just turning up to be entertained, the DM competing with whatever is on Netflix. TTRPGs are the place where people get that social interaction, lean into that part of it.
Not everyone is going to be on for this - some really do just see their DMs as wetware running their entertainment - but don't worry about those folk and do not bother to cater to them. Get one or two people to come along on this journey, encourage them to try new things, try some things with them, then expand the circle and do it again. After a bit you will have tables running in parallel, players swapping about, DMs get a chance to play and the whole group becomes resilient to something happening to any one DM.
Not to say this is a journey for everyone, nor that there is anything wrong with declaring "this is a gaming table that is reliant on this one DM" if all are satisfied with that. But if you find yourself wishing there were others to bear the load with you, then I would suggest some of the above.
Half of the intention of the Supergroup was to create a game design community - and for thoughts on that I direct you to the excellent A Quick and Dirty Guide to Building a Local RPG Design Scene by Brackish Draught - their checklist of ideas maps almost perfectly to what we did and what worked.
The other half of the purpose of the Supergroup was giving forever-DM's a chance to play and that is more likely to be the more useful thing for more of you. We short-circuited this by gathering existing forever-GMs, but what about the case where you are the only one?
Why it matters
One DM and their table, no matter how large the roster, is just one gaming group and it thrives or fails based on fate allowing that DM to continue to run their games. It also has a ceiling for activity based on when that one DM gets saturated and needs to fit in other things like sleeping, work, etc.
Should that DM have to quit for whatever reason, then while you might have a circle of friends, with no DM you do not have a gaming community.
A community forms when the gaming is no longer dependent on any one person - when you have multiple DMs. What I often see, with the people who come to our open tables, is that people want to play and few decide to run their own games - maybe 1 in 6 people through the door DM even once over the year and that includes all our existing DM cohort. There seems to be an apprenticeship approach which takes a while. There seems to be a much more solid divide now between DM and players compared to when I started.
Every player a games-master
When I first got into things, pretty much everyone who played at any of the tables also ran something. This was the mid-90s so the games in play were AD&D, WoD in all its flavours, WHFRP, Dragonlance Saga system, Shadowrun, and Conspiracy X. Everyone had their own thing they ran, according to taste, and we rotated. It meant there was never a shortage of folk ready to run things, the load was much more evenly balanced and the group as a whole more resilient to any one person being away.
I think it was also beneficial because everyone got some time at the head of the table and so knew first hand about the challenges of marshalling a table of players, running a session, and all the various chores of a DM. Thus folk were easier players, less inclined to grief a DM as they had been there too.
I suspect that the range of systems we played also made folk a bit more relaxed about the DM not being the single source of truth, with others around the table checking rules and picking up minor tasks that would otherwise all be routed through the DM. This made everything quicker, cutting down dead time since some 'DM tasks' were being solved by the players.
Since everyone was less familiar with the systems, prior to the internet being universally available in the palm of your hand, there was a higher tolerance to things being 'good enough for now' - making a ruling in the moment and moving on. Min-maxing was less, since all systems were less familiar and any one exploit was more tolerable because you were not dealing with it all the time.
To be fair this also meant that any given campaign progressed more slowly because it was not the continual focus of a groups game time but this is a feature not a bug. Rapid progress in a campaign is not what we are optimising for with these ideas.
"Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
Samuel Becketts line is one of the things to hold as a north star in getting from just a one-DM gaming group to a gaming community. If everyone involved can get relaxed about trying new things and these things maybe being a bit squeaky but with the anticipation that together, everyone will get better, then you have the fertile ground where a community will grow.
There are greater online communities one can participate in, those are their own thing and not my field of expertise so I defer to the better advice of others. For your local table however, getting together an in-person or hybrid group - any one where there is a good chunk of in person meeting up - then I would suggest that those folk, your local micro-environment, is what you want to be adapting to. There is a torrent of advice and opinion online, a firehose that will occupy all your time if you attempt to take it all in - sip from the torrent, take what works usefully for your table and ignore the rest.
The best thing that can come from online sources - or more slowly through books - are ideas, pointers to possible ways - and being open to trying those things with an attitude of testing to see what works is helpful. That test-and-keep or test-and-drop attitude is a great one to have collectively; it both expands the range of sources from which you might draw that one great idea that makes your games better and makes everyone more forgiving for hiccups and rough bits in games where you are trying something new.
Having an attitude of 'try it and keep/dump' is great - openly acknowledging 'we are going to try these rules for a bit then decide if we like them' is good. It takes the pressure off any set of rules being flawless and lets you test how often game-breaking edge cases actually come up. If some marvelous exploit allows the PCs to massively succeed one time, that if probably fine, a great story - if it happens twice per session and is making the game hard to run - tweak or remove it.
People as a whole are much more willing to give things a go when it is a short-run thing - a new system for a one-shot or a short run campaign is a much easier sell than trying to get people to commit to a weekly slot for an indefinite amount of time. In particular when you are trying to wrangle a group of people, no time will work for everyone so rather than locking in on one time forever and losing some people, try things and then adjust.
Thoughts on community
In the same way that the 90s gamers when I came up were pretty omniverous the mid-2010s local lot here used to have an Indie games night where they ran different things every week. This, with a local board-game bar as the venue and a classic forum has formed the backbone of a community that has now been running for over a decade.
If you are trying to get a community off the ground, in particular if you are starting from a single gaming table, then intermixing your big stuff with one-shots gives a great opportunity for others to shine. Switch the main campaign from weekly to every fortnight and have others run something on the off week, or maybe last week of every month is a one-shot - something like that opens up slots for others to have a go under relatively controlled conditions.
Some folk who turn up will only want to play, some will only want to play 5e, this is fine but do not let them stop you. Geek Social Fallacies say 'friends do everything together' but if one person does not want to do a thing and you've got a potential fledgling DM ready to run something and help take that step up - ask the naysayer to go catch a movie that night. As the DM who is putting in all the elbow grease you get to make the calls that help you cultivate a back-up DM. Go forward with the willing if you have enough of them, do not waste your energy trying to get unanimity or convert the unwilling.
Getting your group on board in general with the goal of learning collectively - figuring out how to run the best games, ideally more folk running good games for each other - is a great attitude to have. It makes everyone a participant and responsible for the collective enjoyment. When folk are just turning up to be entertained, the DM competing with whatever is on Netflix. TTRPGs are the place where people get that social interaction, lean into that part of it.
Not everyone is going to be on for this - some really do just see their DMs as wetware running their entertainment - but don't worry about those folk and do not bother to cater to them. Get one or two people to come along on this journey, encourage them to try new things, try some things with them, then expand the circle and do it again. After a bit you will have tables running in parallel, players swapping about, DMs get a chance to play and the whole group becomes resilient to something happening to any one DM.
Not to say this is a journey for everyone, nor that there is anything wrong with declaring "this is a gaming table that is reliant on this one DM" if all are satisfied with that. But if you find yourself wishing there were others to bear the load with you, then I would suggest some of the above.
27 September 2025
Campaign Spin-Up X - Back of the Envelope Campaign Planning
I wrote about "rebooting a campaign with 2d20 Conan" - spinning up a new campaign in the Scaled Lands.
In the grand tradition of getting going by making promises and getting yourself deadlines I poked a list of players and then was committed to at least running something. Shortly after I had a flight for work so that was me stuck in a place with nothing else to do so I worked up the guts of what I needed on the back of an envelope.
Altogether this serves as a nice illustration of constraint breeding creativity. This world had been the campaign where I 'applied the OSR' after discovering all the blogs and wisdom, I had put a lot of thought into it pre-pandemic, including using it for NaNoWriMo, but I had none of that with me when I did this.
First I blocked out things I felt I needed to prep, to declutter my brain and help corral my thoughts into some kind of order. Up in a corner I stuck a to-do list of tasks as I thought of them, again to note and refocus.
Then I started properly thinking of the immediate recent history - the ramp-in to the start. I thought of the forces at play to give factions kicking around, recalled those that I remembered from before, gave names to some that had just existed as 'the infernal fire cult' before.
I thought through what stuff I wanted to see, what were the various secrets for the players to find and what kind of big interesting things could they get up to.
With Yaksha's hexfill method recently in mind, I wrote a d10/d4 encounter table - 10 factions likely to be found out and about and four examples for each.
One of the key reasons I wanted to return to the Scaled Lands is that I hand some wonderful art for the place commissioned from Evlyn Moreau and I never got to use even half of it before the old campaign collapsed. I had a think through how to use that art for best fun.
In the grand tradition of getting going by making promises and getting yourself deadlines I poked a list of players and then was committed to at least running something. Shortly after I had a flight for work so that was me stuck in a place with nothing else to do so I worked up the guts of what I needed on the back of an envelope.
First I blocked out things I felt I needed to prep, to declutter my brain and help corral my thoughts into some kind of order. Up in a corner I stuck a to-do list of tasks as I thought of them, again to note and refocus.
Then I started properly thinking of the immediate recent history - the ramp-in to the start. I thought of the forces at play to give factions kicking around, recalled those that I remembered from before, gave names to some that had just existed as 'the infernal fire cult' before.
I thought through what stuff I wanted to see, what were the various secrets for the players to find and what kind of big interesting things could they get up to.
With Yaksha's hexfill method recently in mind, I wrote a d10/d4 encounter table - 10 factions likely to be found out and about and four examples for each.
One of the key reasons I wanted to return to the Scaled Lands is that I hand some wonderful art for the place commissioned from Evlyn Moreau and I never got to use even half of it before the old campaign collapsed. I had a think through how to use that art for best fun.
10 September 2025
Campaign Phase Shift
On the theme of 'how I prep' - sometimes you hit inflection points or changes to the campaign that require some unusual prep. My home campaign has been running a while, I have talked about 'shifting gears' before but there is an unusual prep condition that crops up when you *shift back* in trying to recapture an old campaign mode. This could also apply where you are trying to spin up a lore-true campaign in a setting with a lot of books; say a Baldurs Gate campaign with players who are Ed Greenwood fans and Forgotten Realms lore fiends - though that would be even worse for a DM. I touched on this in Ducal House Year 6 - DM Challenges - where the player-side solution is 'delegate' and 'domain manage' - but what is the DM to do?
The specific instance for me is that after a 'quest phase' which looks a lot like old school trad style landscape bashing, the party are back at base and once more in their urban familiar terrain of Thenya and its palace.
I was having a little trouble getting the 'urban campaign' gear back, after a whole section of the campaign that had been deliberately broader strokes, coarser grained days with faster time passing and fewer, shallower encounters with NPCs all those needed to be inverted (or consciously adapted where we decide to retain faster time passing in an urban setup).
I had been tracking the 'ongoing activities' - the actions their minions were taking care of and the few major NPCs that they would take the time to scry on a regular basis. It felt a little sparse; the palace, their base of activities, lived but the city did not.
Prep Notes
As the party bounced around the countryside, focused on their main mission, I had been doing a light touch view of actions within the city/realm, mostly the PCs own to-do list.
Each session I was doing a sweep up of
- actions they left on the boil
- factions and their agendas
- timeline evolution / consequences
The results of this can be seen in the 'timeline/consequences' section (box 7) for session 136.
Session 136 itself was an extended fight sequence as the party attempted to escape an ancient temple with while rescuing an ally, retrieving an artifact and holding off a swarm of undead pteradons and a pair of vrock. The session ended with them teleporting back to their home-base so the 'post-session consequences/next session set-up' needed to be focussed on their being back in their home city.
Here I pulled forward the elements last left lying around - activities of their minions/hirelings, continuation of the threads set in motion last time they were in town - all this was fine, good information but it left the question of 'what is the rest of the city up to' unclear because the players focus prior to leaving had been on prep for the quest they just did and absolute emergencies. The faction politics and actions of other NPCs they were likely to check in on had fallen out of focus - if they had set off to visit old NPC pals I would have struggled. The gears of the city were no longer spinning in my head.
To overcome that trouble getting that mode back I had a look back 100 sessions to a previous 'full swing urban session set' for inspiration - going a few sessions forward and back to recall how the pacing had worked and what happened session on session.
Looking back to my old urban format and recalling while 'wilderness' adventures use space and distance, urban adventures use time so the days schedule (box 3) becomes important again.
In those couple of sessions there were activities happening at the palace, slower RP-heavy interactions with various NPCs, planning sessions, some palace dungeoneering and various social outings. I had rumours, notes on major NPCs opinions, rosters of who was present at the palace and social occasions for evenings.
I decided no harm to re-activate or echo some of those elements that were seen in those sessions; pruning away ones that got resolved and expanding or escalating things that had been left to fester and run wild.
All this got folded into my single session prep format as a very extended 'post session notes / session consequences' work up.
- the long list of ideas
- till back over old soil
- make the NPCs spring back to life
These were collected into the 'consequences' part of the last sessions sheet (box 7) - this could have been done at any point but best if it is done relatively close to time of use so they are as fresh in mind as possible.
I was given the boon of session 137 was taken by the players for R&R, a stand-alone beach episode which bought me the time to do this prep.
This set me up well for a 'report in and take stock' session 138 - this included resolving a plotline running since the start of the campaign by executing the last priest of a wicked god using their freshly-retrieved artefact. There was a run to an outlying fortress to stash said dangerous artefact, teleporting out to an outlying monastery to have dinner with a seer, teleporting back and then using the few hours before bed for some impromptu dungeoneering in the basement.
And of course - after all that set up for urban play - the players decide to visit the moon, to see if they could - but at least the base city breathes once more.
The specific instance for me is that after a 'quest phase' which looks a lot like old school trad style landscape bashing, the party are back at base and once more in their urban familiar terrain of Thenya and its palace.
I was having a little trouble getting the 'urban campaign' gear back, after a whole section of the campaign that had been deliberately broader strokes, coarser grained days with faster time passing and fewer, shallower encounters with NPCs all those needed to be inverted (or consciously adapted where we decide to retain faster time passing in an urban setup).
I had been tracking the 'ongoing activities' - the actions their minions were taking care of and the few major NPCs that they would take the time to scry on a regular basis. It felt a little sparse; the palace, their base of activities, lived but the city did not.
Prep Notes
As the party bounced around the countryside, focused on their main mission, I had been doing a light touch view of actions within the city/realm, mostly the PCs own to-do list.
Each session I was doing a sweep up of
- actions they left on the boil
- factions and their agendas
- timeline evolution / consequences
The results of this can be seen in the 'timeline/consequences' section (box 7) for session 136.
Session 136 itself was an extended fight sequence as the party attempted to escape an ancient temple with while rescuing an ally, retrieving an artifact and holding off a swarm of undead pteradons and a pair of vrock. The session ended with them teleporting back to their home-base so the 'post-session consequences/next session set-up' needed to be focussed on their being back in their home city.
Episode 136 session sheet
Here I pulled forward the elements last left lying around - activities of their minions/hirelings, continuation of the threads set in motion last time they were in town - all this was fine, good information but it left the question of 'what is the rest of the city up to' unclear because the players focus prior to leaving had been on prep for the quest they just did and absolute emergencies. The faction politics and actions of other NPCs they were likely to check in on had fallen out of focus - if they had set off to visit old NPC pals I would have struggled. The gears of the city were no longer spinning in my head.
To overcome that trouble getting that mode back I had a look back 100 sessions to a previous 'full swing urban session set' for inspiration - going a few sessions forward and back to recall how the pacing had worked and what happened session on session.
Looking back to my old urban format and recalling while 'wilderness' adventures use space and distance, urban adventures use time so the days schedule (box 3) becomes important again.
In those couple of sessions there were activities happening at the palace, slower RP-heavy interactions with various NPCs, planning sessions, some palace dungeoneering and various social outings. I had rumours, notes on major NPCs opinions, rosters of who was present at the palace and social occasions for evenings.
Episode 33 session sheet
I decided no harm to re-activate or echo some of those elements that were seen in those sessions; pruning away ones that got resolved and expanding or escalating things that had been left to fester and run wild.
All this got folded into my single session prep format as a very extended 'post session notes / session consequences' work up.
- the long list of ideas
- till back over old soil
- make the NPCs spring back to life
These were collected into the 'consequences' part of the last sessions sheet (box 7) - this could have been done at any point but best if it is done relatively close to time of use so they are as fresh in mind as possible.
I was given the boon of session 137 was taken by the players for R&R, a stand-alone beach episode which bought me the time to do this prep.
Episode 137 session sheet
This set me up well for a 'report in and take stock' session 138 - this included resolving a plotline running since the start of the campaign by executing the last priest of a wicked god using their freshly-retrieved artefact. There was a run to an outlying fortress to stash said dangerous artefact, teleporting out to an outlying monastery to have dinner with a seer, teleporting back and then using the few hours before bed for some impromptu dungeoneering in the basement.
And of course - after all that set up for urban play - the players decide to visit the moon, to see if they could - but at least the base city breathes once more.
04 June 2025
In praise of the single page monster manual
In my ongoing quest to lighten my load, Monster Manuals have been a bane of my life with open table games - players can go anywhere, encounter all sorts of things - or at the same time run into nothing unusual and thus I hauled it around unnecessarily. Our place spaces often have patchy wifi and relying on that for calling up anything when most of the players are also running off D&D Beyond has proven foolhardy in the past.
So - the single page monster manual from Blog of Holding was a god-send - I have long been a fan of the single-page approach and 'Just Use Bears' - and this was right up my alley. Since it went in my DM-binder it has proven itself again and again, top marks - for the standard things.
To make sure I have all bases covered, I wanted to capture the 'specials' - the various effects that make things more than just a scaled up version of a goblin with a blade. I grabbed Dice Goblins "Just Use Bears or Wolves, or Spiders or Tigers." and found while it is good it does not quite fit what I need since it is written for Block, Dodge, Parry. The core concept is exactly what I want, I just need that refined for what I use at table - typically 5e.
I decided I needed two things
1. A single page reference version of "Just Use Bears or Wolves, etc."
2. A quick converter for 0e/1e content to 5e
So - the single page monster manual from Blog of Holding was a god-send - I have long been a fan of the single-page approach and 'Just Use Bears' - and this was right up my alley. Since it went in my DM-binder it has proven itself again and again, top marks - for the standard things.
I decided I needed two things
1. A single page reference version of "Just Use Bears or Wolves, etc."
2. A quick converter for 0e/1e content to 5e
31 May 2025
Domain play experiences & lessons learned
Some suggestions based on my experiences with domain games.
- a light weight resolution system that spares a DM bookkeeping is probably a mercy
- structuring how you accept moves/turn orders/etc. so that it reins in players natural urge to leverage the whole realm they have access to is also probably a good idea
- some kind of shared forum, discord or other text based arena for players to negotiate and snarl and posture at one another is good because it makes visible all the activity to those who might otherwise miss it. Without that everything has to route through the DM and is another burden they need to shoulder.
- games like this are the ultimate 'split party' - everything a DM can do to spare their energies for juggling all the parallel threads is a good idea - light book keeping, light resolution, players directly and publicly interacting, etc.
This was started by conversation on discord prompted by the 'Cataphracts' game. I had the privilege to play in a couple of big domain games - two of Mike Rastons recent ones- Empyrean Dynasty and Sagadarium and two different ones back in my college days - and the common point of stress/failure was the processing load mid-late game puts on the DM as things get complex.
- a light weight resolution system that spares a DM bookkeeping is probably a mercy
- structuring how you accept moves/turn orders/etc. so that it reins in players natural urge to leverage the whole realm they have access to is also probably a good idea
- some kind of shared forum, discord or other text based arena for players to negotiate and snarl and posture at one another is good because it makes visible all the activity to those who might otherwise miss it. Without that everything has to route through the DM and is another burden they need to shoulder.
- games like this are the ultimate 'split party' - everything a DM can do to spare their energies for juggling all the parallel threads is a good idea - light book keeping, light resolution, players directly and publicly interacting, etc.
This was started by conversation on discord prompted by the 'Cataphracts' game. I had the privilege to play in a couple of big domain games - two of Mike Rastons recent ones- Empyrean Dynasty and Sagadarium and two different ones back in my college days - and the common point of stress/failure was the processing load mid-late game puts on the DM as things get complex.
23 April 2025
The hunt for DM Zero
Or: on spontaneously generating DMs.
tl:dr; trying to backtrack the 'origins of the scene' that I started playing in finds we were apparently a collective of spontaneously generated DMs who all figured it out from books.
This started with a call with an old pal from back when I first started gaming, and we got onto the topic of whoever taught us how to DM? We chased the rabbit's tail around and expanded it out to other friends of ours that we remember being among our first DMs, the answer we came back with was no one.
This was early 90s, hinterlands of Ireland. For those not from there, this was pre-Euro and the punt/pound exchange rate and postage was a mild-to-serious choke on getting your hands on any gaming material and we were the literal end of the line. Nonetheless there was a pretty decent TTRPG gaming scene that sprang up and I was curious as to how and where we all figured out how to DM.
tl:dr; trying to backtrack the 'origins of the scene' that I started playing in finds we were apparently a collective of spontaneously generated DMs who all figured it out from books.
This started with a call with an old pal from back when I first started gaming, and we got onto the topic of whoever taught us how to DM? We chased the rabbit's tail around and expanded it out to other friends of ours that we remember being among our first DMs, the answer we came back with was no one.
This was early 90s, hinterlands of Ireland. For those not from there, this was pre-Euro and the punt/pound exchange rate and postage was a mild-to-serious choke on getting your hands on any gaming material and we were the literal end of the line. Nonetheless there was a pretty decent TTRPG gaming scene that sprang up and I was curious as to how and where we all figured out how to DM.
09 April 2025
Campaign Spin-Up IX - Dual-Mode Hex-Crawl (Continuous Campaign/Episodic)
I stood up a campaign to test and drive my #Hexcrawl25 challenge that had been intended to operate in two modes:
* Classic continuous campaign
* Episodic open table
The time and venue is the Friday night open table sessions I play at - historically I offered an open-table (Brancalonia, Spelljammer Academy) but I wanted to try and mix in something more persistent with returning players. The deliberate aspects of this campaign were:
- dual mode - A-team / open table on alternating weeks
- follow the players, drop hooks but no big plot
- toy deployment - use the shelves of books
- newbie friendly
I decided to run the campaign part on a biweekly basis and on the off-week run one-shots. Both will use the common starting villlage of the hexmap.
* Classic continuous campaign
* Episodic open table
The time and venue is the Friday night open table sessions I play at - historically I offered an open-table (Brancalonia, Spelljammer Academy) but I wanted to try and mix in something more persistent with returning players. The deliberate aspects of this campaign were:
- dual mode - A-team / open table on alternating weeks
- follow the players, drop hooks but no big plot
- toy deployment - use the shelves of books
- newbie friendly
I decided to run the campaign part on a biweekly basis and on the off-week run one-shots. Both will use the common starting villlage of the hexmap.
02 April 2025
Auditing my home campaign city for urban game-playability
Reading Dwiz's magisterial 6-part series on running cities I was struck how I recognise a lot of as things I have arrived at over trial and error with the Ducal House campaign - but what have I missed, where can it be improved?
We have put in a lot of time in cities over the campaign; the color coding below is all the sessions that are non-Thenya - anything un-highlighted is Thenya. This is 76 of 130 sessions in Thenya, 372 of 593 hours of play - so we have spent nearly 2/3 of the campaign in the city.
I was grinning reading Dwiz's posts because it is based off a Watabous fantasy city generator map and I used the districts created from that map.
We have put in a lot of time in cities over the campaign; the color coding below is all the sessions that are non-Thenya - anything un-highlighted is Thenya. This is 76 of 130 sessions in Thenya, 372 of 593 hours of play - so we have spent nearly 2/3 of the campaign in the city.
I was grinning reading Dwiz's posts because it is based off a Watabous fantasy city generator map and I used the districts created from that map.
29 March 2025
Hex-maps and high-mobility magic
My home game got another boost of mobility over this most recent level up with Wind Walk and Teleport. This has lead to a chunky shift in gameplay which makes 'broad shallow' prep the name of the game from here out. I had talked about high-speed hex-crawling before; large distances were crossed with multiple things noted in passing but only a few key locations were interacted with - on par to a standard session - but even higher speeds enables new party approaches.
Previously we have been dealing with ~ 8 hours of flying time at ~ 30mph using the Spelljamming Saddle so 3 x 10mile hexes per hour - as fast as a galloping horse, sustained as long as the pilot can stay awake. Wind Walk gets that up to 60mph, doubling that. The red circle on the map was the previous 'one day' limit of their operations - the second arc is their new limit.
This past session the players were ~ 3 sessions deep into chasing down a particular quest goal - settling their immediate problems, getting their gear and themselves into position and staging to a plateau above their objective. And then they decided to spend the entire session flexing Wind Walk to scout for the location of an enemy stronghold associated with a different 'quest line' so to speak. Both are strands of a potential undead apocalypse, one divine, one arcane - divine had been solidly in focus until they decided to detour and scout the arcane thread.
I had prepped in detail for the divine thread before the session but did have enough of a sense of what the arcane thread was to be able to wing it; most importantly I had done some general region prep on who was likely to be seen during over flights which included foes tied to both strands and I was able to use those. Some previous thought on the timetable of the arcane foes also allowed me to pretty quickly extrapolate what must be found in their stronghold if they are at the point they were in the plan.
Mobility multipliers like teleport and wind walk are interesting to deal with because teleport is manageable - you have to know a place to safely go there so player interest is expressed and either it is a return to a known location or you, the DM, have a chance to ponder what the place is like while they figure out how to get a good enough read to risk teleporting there. High speed flyers are more of a challenge as discussed previously but still they are a somewhat manageable scale; the key is whether or not the location is known. Rapidly travelling to a known place with high level magic - sure - you lose the travel encounters but fine.
Pure speed multipliers like Wind Walk make high speed searching of an area for things known to be around somewhere *on a whim* into a new challenge; with magics like this in the back pocket there is no prep-time because the heroes can just decide, cast the spell and go.
Previously we have been dealing with ~ 8 hours of flying time at ~ 30mph using the Spelljamming Saddle so 3 x 10mile hexes per hour - as fast as a galloping horse, sustained as long as the pilot can stay awake. Wind Walk gets that up to 60mph, doubling that. The red circle on the map was the previous 'one day' limit of their operations - the second arc is their new limit.
This past session the players were ~ 3 sessions deep into chasing down a particular quest goal - settling their immediate problems, getting their gear and themselves into position and staging to a plateau above their objective. And then they decided to spend the entire session flexing Wind Walk to scout for the location of an enemy stronghold associated with a different 'quest line' so to speak. Both are strands of a potential undead apocalypse, one divine, one arcane - divine had been solidly in focus until they decided to detour and scout the arcane thread.
I had prepped in detail for the divine thread before the session but did have enough of a sense of what the arcane thread was to be able to wing it; most importantly I had done some general region prep on who was likely to be seen during over flights which included foes tied to both strands and I was able to use those. Some previous thought on the timetable of the arcane foes also allowed me to pretty quickly extrapolate what must be found in their stronghold if they are at the point they were in the plan.
Mobility multipliers like teleport and wind walk are interesting to deal with because teleport is manageable - you have to know a place to safely go there so player interest is expressed and either it is a return to a known location or you, the DM, have a chance to ponder what the place is like while they figure out how to get a good enough read to risk teleporting there. High speed flyers are more of a challenge as discussed previously but still they are a somewhat manageable scale; the key is whether or not the location is known. Rapidly travelling to a known place with high level magic - sure - you lose the travel encounters but fine.
Pure speed multipliers like Wind Walk make high speed searching of an area for things known to be around somewhere *on a whim* into a new challenge; with magics like this in the back pocket there is no prep-time because the heroes can just decide, cast the spell and go.
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