Chronicles of Shandahar

While I was at Gencon this year, I picked up the Chronicles of Shandahar books, Child of Prophecy and Warrior of Destiny, from the authors' booth in the Art Show. I'm always reading something, and after skimming the introduction of the first book, I was intrigued. The authors, Tracy Chowdhury and Ted Mark Crim, were really nice and signed copies of the books I had purchased, and off I went home, excited about having something new to read.

I'll admit, and I'm sure several of you have experienced the same thing, after coming home from a convention, I sometimes forget all the stuff I bought; this year, I kinda forgot about the Shandahar books. But once I found them again....

I could not stop reading them. The books are well-written and very engrossing. It is easy to become emotionally invested in the characters, and who doesn't love a struggle of good versus evil where you really hope good will win, but you are a little nervous to turn the page in case things go wrong.

I visited their website, and I was not surprised to learn that these books were based on a campaign. There is so much in the storyline that reminds me of epic adventures in which I've played that I can almost picture friends at a table, rolling dice, making spot checks or casting spells or attacking the Big Bad.

I'm near the end of the second book, and I have to admit, I don't want to end it because I'm going to be so sad when it's over. But at the same time, I can't wait to see how it all ends. I can assure you, no matter what happens, I'll be looking forward to a third book.

T-Shirt of the Week: BULLYWUGS RULE THE NIGHT

ANARCHY IN THE PEAT BOG! Show those filthy monkeys you won't be oppressed any more with not one but TWO bloody amazing t-shirts! (Vanir could not bear the thought of depriving the public of a shirt with just the 'frog horns' on it.)

Click here for previews of the actual shirt designs:
Bullywugs Rule The Night
The Frog Horns

Stories: Ari: The Beginning

Introducing Ari, from her early childhood to her pre-adventuring days. Meet the elf before she became famous!!

Re-Inventing Ari

As most of you have probably already heard, we're starting Act 2 of our campaign. Which has presented a unique issue to me as a player. This will be the first character I have played that has returned (as a PC) in the same campaign setting. The difference: 4 years have passed since the first adventure concluded. So, how do you age your character 4 years, without the benefit of gameplay to provide experiences?

A Brief History of the Elf

Before I go any further, let me tell you a little bit about Ari beyond the odds and ends I've share thus far. I developed the elven fighter Sar'ruaselari (Ari, for short) based on the "Champions of Corellon Larethian" prestige class from the Races of the Wild supplement. Orphaned when she was very young, Ari grew up as a ward of a temple of Corellon; she admired the Champions, and upon reaching her adulthood, she began to pursue the Champion lifestyle. During the character development stage, I knew that the rest of the party were followers of Horus-Re (a sun god as opposed to moon favored by Corellon), so I needed a reason for Ari to be traveling with the rest of them. I developed a story where a messenger from Corellon charged her with a mission that would start with these adventurers. (Read the full backstory.)

Fast Forward Four Years

Upon successfully saving the world, the group disbanded. What would Ari do now? What cool stories could she share at the class, er, party reunion to make everyone jealous?

This is where having a fairly well-developed backstory helped re-invent Ari. I had details from her past that I could pull into her future. I created a brief history to fill the four year gap with details from before her adventuring days with sufficient detail to make it realistic to Ari and to inspire me during Act 2. (For the curious among you, I will try to get that posted soon.)

Behind the Screen: Staying fresh...

This week my mind has been set on putting together materials for the second act of our campaign. This has presented me and my illustrious co-DM, Kanati, with the usual fun of dreaming up new things to torment our players with but the second time around things are proving slightly more difficult.

You Can Never Go Home

Epic storylines are fantastic because the events are so large and powerful that it should fundamentally change the people involved. In the end, it should feel a bit like Lord of the Rings: the characters are so different by the time they finally are able to arrive home that their lives are driven to a different purpose.

My players are embracing opportunities to re-invent themselves as this campaign gets underway... some have found purpose with academic or altruistic pursuits, others are completing some more personal stories in their down time. They are taking the opportunity to emerge from the first act of the campaign changed in some way, in the process rejuvenating their characters for a return to action.

Meanwhile, us DMs have been hard at work creating a new storyline. It has been more difficult creating content that hasn't been "done before" in this space. Earlier this week, I did a piece on the reinvention of characters and little did I know that a few days later I would be struggling to reinvent myself as a DM.

Throw that crutch out the window, Tiny Tim!

It is hard work to come up with content that is not hackneyed and derivative. I've found some fertile ground in some surprising places this week: indie rock, both re-runs and the premiere of NBC's Heroes, even my crazy coworkers. As this campaign goes on, I plan to share some of this new episodic content here in hopes that someone else might benefit from my glimpses of madness.

One thing that I'm doing to ensure freshness (aside from deoderant) is building plot points around new interesting NPCs. New non-player characters with a personality and a fleshed out motive just breeds perspective and allows the players to attach to the campaign in a different way. The resulting roleplay will likely open up new avenues for your players to walk down. Essentially, your players will make the scenarios fresh for you and that is a powerful thing.

I'm going to turn this one around on you, gentle reader: how do you keep your campaigns fresh? Where do you draw your inspiration from?

Creativity Through Limitation

I frequently like to step outside the box when I roleplay, and I read an article this morning that really got me thinking.

The great thing about roleplaying is that you can use your imagination and become whatever (and whoever) you want. Granted, in a gaming environment, you are subject to some limitations so there's a sense of growth, realism, and challenge. But by and large, fantasy roleplaying is an exercise in wish fulfillment for the players. That is, they want to escape the drudgery and limitations of real life. They want to have exciting adventures, and to be more than themselves. A lot of people create basically a superpowered alter-ego for themselves and they can do what they're afraid to in real life. D&D lets them live the dream to a certain extent, and that's really cool.

Limitation as a Tool for Creative Thinking?

A different way to roleplay is to give the players a set of limitations with which to build their characters. A very light version of this is to restrict where the PC's come from or their available races, etc. in order to mold how their backstories will work. In our last campaign, I restricted the party to being humans because the story required it. Another very common way to roleplay like this is to use pregenerated characters. While many use pre-gen characters in a more hack-and-slash environment because it's faster and balanced, it can be a way for the DM to more easily control the story and for the players to step outside of the box they usually play in and try to identify with a new character's way of thinking. If your players are in a rut doing the same thing over and over again, try keeping them away from the place they dug it.

My lovely wife Efreak, who is an artist, frequently tells me about how there are two kinds of artists: creators, and discoverers. Creators make something new from scratch. Discoverers tend to take existing things and blend them or find new meaning in something old. This type of roleplaying is discovery. It's not creativity in the sense that the player gets to create a new character. It's that they get to create their own version of an existing character.

Pros and Cons

I already know a lot of you crinkled up your noses at the words "pre-generated characters" and immediately thought of a bad experience you've had. It's been sort of a mixed bag for me as well, but done right it can be fun. For instance, you use pre-generated characters at Nascrag. And despite it being some of the best fun on the planet, I will admit there's a pretty steep learning curve handling those characters' backstories and pre-planned motivations and feelings toward others. I saw a lot of people struggle with this, and it's not for everybody.

That being said, you can hit the ground running if you play with pre-gen characters -- especially if you give them out to your players well in advance so they can be familiar with the backstories you've written. We all know character generation can pretty much kill the first night of a gaming session. If you're in a group that can't meet often or you're playing your once-a-year-only game at Gen Con with strange people from the Internet, this is a really good way to get started -- fast.

Another good thing about writing the backstory for a pre-gen character is that you get to see how the player reacts to the cards he's been dealt. A female bard character in Nascrag last year knew she was pregnant but didn't want to tell anyone. And about halfway through, we were all going to be polymorphed to hide from the bad guys, which she knew (from her backstory) might be harmful to the baby. Watching that player wrestle with that decision and everyone dealing with her eventual decision not to do it made the game a lot more interesting because someone had to walk a few steps in shoes other than their usual ones.

Abandon All Hope All Ye Who Roleplay Here

If you really want to try something crazy, you can put yourself in someone else's shoes entirely. I haven't played it yet, but there's a new roleplaying game out called Steal Away Jordan, where you play as a slave in the South before the U.S. Civil War. No wish-fulfillment here, guys.

The concept to me sounds intensely interesting, but I don't know that it would be "fun" per se. It strikes me that games like this are the gaming equivalent of method acting, and you'll walk away changed but not necessarily having had a great time. (The photo in that article is priceless!)

But, then again, games don't always have to be fun, just like art isn't always there to make us feel good. Yehuda wrote a fantastic article in his blog a couple months ago that you should definitely read if this sort of thing intrigues you. In actual practice, you probably won't want to go this extreme. Unless you've sat down with your players and collectively decided you want to try something like this, you're probably going to have a lot of people not having fun.

Finding the Balance

What you can do is come up with a setting for your players and characters that need played. For instance, Nascrag's last story arc revolved around a royal family and the PC's were either in the family or close associates. This allowed the adventure to be geared toward specific goals involving these characters. Having pregenerated characters certainly made that easier, but there's certainly nothing preventing you as a DM from fine-tuning how much you want to limit the characters. It can be anything from only limiting where they come from or what classes to be, to giving them specific roles in the story that need to be played (and they flesh out the details), to giving them complete pregenerated characters and throwing them in the ocean to swim.

If you're going to do this, you should absolutely sit down as a group and talk it over. As I said before, it's not for everybody and it really stresses some people out trying to think outside the box. Some will bristle at the restriction of their creative freedom. Some players wind up roleplaying the same way they always do even with a new character, and you should be prepared for that eventuality. Some, like me, will have a ton of fun with it and want every game to be like this.

Find your balance within the group, and if everybody's still having fun at the end, then it worked. Just like everything else in roleplaying games!

Managing Metagaming

It's one of the most difficult situations in which to find yourself: possessed with knowledge your character doesn't have. Maybe you overheard Shadow the Rogue make a deal with a stranger in the middle of the night, but Ceril the Barbarian was asleep and had no clue that anything happened. Or maybe you know that casting a specific sequence of spells at a Prismatic Wall will destroy it, but there's no way that Ceril knows what those spells are or the order in which they need to be cast.

Applying your personal knowledge to your character is one of those all important you-must-never-do-this taboo's of D&D: metagaming. It's also one of the hardest sins to avoid committing. And while I'm by no means infallible, here are some techniques that have helped me manage my metagaming.

#1. Take Notes. For me, the act of taking notes negates my creative (ie. roleplaying) impulses. When I take notes, I am less likely to act on the knowledge contained in them because I'm so focused on writing down everything; I don't pay attention to how the details would apply to my character, and Ceril remains oblivious. By divorcing yourself from the proceedings, you have less of a chance to assimilate this new information into your character's knowledge base.

#2. State Your Innocence. When it comes around to you to decide what action to take, reiterate what it is that you don't know. By stating the absence of this knowledge, you have already eliminated options you might have taken based on this knowledge. Consider this: if you know the goblin is within 30' and you don't have the Point-Blank Shot feat, you're not likely to attack with your ranged weapon. By the same token, if Ceril doesn't know that the Mummy Lord has damage reduction, Ceril is still likely to make his normal attack.

#3. Remove Yourself from Temptation. If it's just too much, if you just know that by overhearing this conversation at the table, you will not be able to avoid using this information, physically remove yourself from the environment. Take a quick break. Go get a snack. Let the dog out. If you don't know it, you can't use it to metagame.

I'm not promising that these will work for everyone. And I'm definitely not promising that following these techniques will eliminate metagaming; that's why I titled this "managing" metagaming. But I do feel that if we as players make a personal commitment to manage our metagaming, we will create a better environment for roleplaying.

Behind the Screen: Reinvention, the best anti-rut device...

In my last installment, I touched briefly on the concept of allowing opportunities to allow your characters to reinvent themselves. There are many other ways that you can foster reinvention in your campaign, both directly and indirectly.

Give your characters options

In the first act of our campaign, Vanir played a bard that was quite skilled at attracting the ladies. The situation arose that he needed to rescue some local children from a house that was thought to be haunted, and with no ready source of reinforcements he decided to held a rock and roll seminar on how to be cool and score with the ladies in exchange for forming a magical rescue posse.

Now, it was hard to tell at this moment whether or not we were looking at an attempt to create a D&D version of Animal House or if something was going on here, but the notion intrigued me enough that I let him lay out his plan for me and enact it.

It was a completely different, surreal altruistic side to this character that never would've come to light if Vanir wasn't given the option to try what he wanted to try. If you give your characters some breadth to reinvent themselves, you will probably be surprised how often they will take that opportunity.

That doesn't mean you can't force it

If you find that your characters are stuck in a rut and act the same way at most situations, its perfectly acceptable (and recommended) that you give them a hard decision. Make them choose between saving the orphanage or rescuing the damsel in distress. Sometimes forcing the characters to figure out how to think "outside the box" on how to resolve a situation will bring about some real reflection on how they would act.

The trick becomes creating these encounters so that the player and the character really relates to both sides of the equation. You will then see them work in surprisingly fresh ways to get to a happy conclusion for both sides. Whether or not you give them the option to save both the orphanage or the damsel is really up to you. It might be interesting to see if they'd stay to rebuild the orphanage if it was destroyed, or seek out vengeance on the baddie that offed the damsel. It is in these moments that your characters have the option to grow in new ways.

Artificial Reinvention

As I spoke about on Friday, we elected to let some time pass between story arcs in our campaign. We encouraged our players to tell us what happened in the years after the first adventure concluded, which created an artificial moment for the players to reflect on what the characters wanted to do next.

It doesn't necessarily need to be years, you can engineer a few weeks/months of downtime within your storylines to let your characters settle with their decisions for a bit and see if they emerge at all changed from the experience. We've had a lot of luck in making these moments occur between game sessions, so the players can think about what has happened and what they want to happen next.

This can be good for you as a DM

I encourage you to find what works best for your group and give this a try, you will find that new character motivations are fertile ground for fueling future campaign ideas. Reinvention in this way becomes a mutually beneficial exercise for both player and DM, so give it a try!

Evensbrook #10

New Evensbrook comic every Monday!

Co-DMing: Surviving the Game

In my last post, I told the story of how Dante and I teamed up to co-DM, and the lessons I learned from that experience. (Mostly, the experience of not listening to him.) Then, less than an hour before we were to start the final session of the mini-campaign, he suggested the following to me: "Hey, how about you run the last one since it's your baby?"

I almost told him "oh HELL no" and punched him. But Dante's known me long enough to know that he's faster than I am and can usually evade punches, and that he can push specific psychological buttons to make me curious enough about an idea of his to think I came up with it. And somehow, he managed to get me latched on to the thought that I could try to see this thing out the way I saw it in my head instead of him losing it in the translation. I suspect that his reasons for doing so were numerous, including being frustrated with my stubbornness, wanting to watch me wreck the train a little for a change, and giving me good valuable DM experience under fire. Even so, I decided to say the hell with it and give it a go.

Tracks? What Tracks?

I knew by this point in the campaign that the players were going to do whatever the hell they wanted. So from the first moment that I sat down at the table, I decided no railroading. If they decided to kill each other, set fire to the forest, and blow up the world, then I was OK with that. I would go down with my ship.

The plan for the evening was that the PC's would go to this lumber yard up north, revealing the identity of their Important NPC. This guy was the half-elven son of an evil Chancellor who was famously anti-elf, even trying to turn the whole nation against them. They'd get enough people realizing the Chancellor was a big hypocrite, and the bad guy would stage an elaborate setup to discredit the PC's, where they'd ultimately crash the party and bring this whole thing to a climax. It sounded great in my head, would have been a sweet novel.

"No railroading" turned out to be the best idea I had all night. About two minutes in, all hell broke loose and I found myself with one party member deciding to defect to the bad guys, 2 members of the party actively hunting him down to kill him, and our ninja character quietly knifing the Important NPC in the back with a poisoned dagger "to keep him out of trouble". No problem. They'd been trying to kill the diplomat for a few sessions, if they rolled right he was dead. Somehow, he escaped. They kept searching. I rolled for that, making the DC higher as time went on until they gave up since there were no seasoned trackers. So I let him get away.

When Life Gives You Homicidal Maniacs, Make Homicidal Maniade

Instead of going where I wanted them to go, the PC's decide the direct route is so much better, so they keep the half-elf knocked out and take him to the city. I decide to let the Chancellor's little kangaroo court happen anyway, and they'll show up as it's starting. The reason that it's going as planned is that our escaped diplomat has successfully made it back to the city and plead his case. And I offered him a chance to live: interrogate an impostor half-elf in front of the crowd to make the Chancellor look good -- or die. Seemed like a good opportunity for some roleplaying.

The player playing the diplomat clearly disagreed with me, as shortly thereafter he tells me he has hung himself in his cell. Well, so much for that idea. I'd seen it as an opportunity to pull out some incredible bullshit and roleplay his eyeballs out, but it wasn't fun for him. No problem. My original plan was to have an NPC run the tribunal anyway, so that was fine.

Well, until the PC's show up, sneak in a little bit, and then start killing all the guards in sight and a couple of civilians with fireballs. (Did I mention the wizard was captain of the city guard?) At this point, I am pretty convinced that I am not going to have a whole lot of recourse except for killing them all. So I have a senator show up with about 50 guards in tow, and he demands to know what the hell is going on RIGHT NOW.

Stupid Ranger gets credit for saving the party in my book. She casts Light on all of their clothes and claims they are all on a Holy Mission to expose the Chancellor's lies. I figure nobody's going to buy that but it's enough of an attention-getter to keep them alive for a minute (Tracy Hickman-style). Then they pull out the half-elf, who looks like the Chancellor but with pointy ears, Now THERE'S a reason they'd stop trying to kill them. The senator shits a brick and calls off the dogs. Then they round up a posse and dethrone the chancellor. VICTORY!

Post-Mortem

Yeah, I fudged a little. The story was weak in some places, and there were parts that weren't exactly plausible. But you know what? Pretty much everybody at the table was engaged and having fun. There was rampant roleplay (albeit kinda scary roleplay) happening, especially with our ninja and our psionic characters making some very memorable moments. ("Huh? Where am I?" "Don't you remember that awesome speech you just gave and everybody was cheering?" <psionic memory alteration> "Oh yeah, that was AWESOME!")

In short, everybody had fun -- even the guy who committed suicide, if that makes any sense -- and last time I checked, that means the DM did his job. (Somehow!)

And I discovered something too -- I was having fun the whole time. Once I finally let go and decided to let things happen as they went, things were a lot less forced and a lot more fun. Sure, I'd like to be a bit more prepared for the inevitable off-roading, but it doesn't bother me like it used to. I simply cannot see how a session could go wronger than this one, and if I survived this..... perhaps I can do this after all.

But for now, I'm more than happy to let Dante and Eric take the reins again.