9 things I've learned from reading all these GLoGhacks

So, you have a GLoGhack. You’re pretty proud of it, and you’ve put it on the internet. But you want to level up. You’ve been seeing a bunch of other hacks, and they strike you as professional, clean, and honed. How did they get there, and how can you join their ranks?

Well let me tell you, after having read ~20 hacks for my GLoG review series and even more for the GLOGGIES, I've isolated 9 methods of GLoGhack gud. Disclaimer: I am by no means any sort of game design expert, and half of this stuff I haven’t yet done with MARROW (though you bet your boots I plan to), so take all this with a grain of salt.

1. PLAYTEST, PLAYTEST, PLAYTEST

I cannot stress enough that nothing will get your hack ready like sitting down with people and playing. No matter if your game is ballpoint pen on cocktail napkin or published physical artifact, players will make it come alive and show you where it could be improved better than any amount of theorycrafting. If you don’t have players in your area, find a group on Discord, even just to play a one-shot with! We only bite on days that end in Y. Also, playtest other people’s hacks, running and playing. Also also, play in your own hacks. Any perspective you can get from a table is invaluable, and better than any of the other drivel on this list.

2. FOCUS

This is perhaps the most important thing, hence first. What is your hack for? Is it centered around a cool mechanic? Is it built to exist in your homebrewed world? Does it emulate some genre? Get a lockdown on the aesthetics of your game, the narrower the better. A game about Dungeon Rats is great. A game about Dungeon Rat politics, with intrigue and backstabbing in the Knottail Court, is even better. Every dimension of your game should help feed into your mission as much as practically possible. Write yourself a manifesto.

3. MECHANICAL CONSOLIDATION

The second biggest problem I encounter, and one that plagues even me yet. Some hacks are no more than a curated collection of nifty mechanics and house rules bolted onto a d20 core. While that’s a great way to do things, especially for your first foray into hacking and game design, eventually you’ll want to trim the fat, step back, and look at each mechanic as it relates to the others. Is there redundancy? Inconsistency? Just too many subsystems for particular situations? Centralize as much as you can, it will help everyone.

4. FLOW

Perhaps the most nebulous, but arguably the most important. If you want anyone else to be able to run your hack well, you have to put a lot of thought into the order and manner in which you present information. Answer every question a reader has as quickly as you can muster. Present procedures in order of frequency of use, and present steps stepwise. Put similar concepts by each other. Lean on headings, page references, and repetition like a crutch.

5. VISUAL IDENTITY

Draw people in with flashy colors, fonts, and pictures. Add in a cover page. Throw in some cool headings and page borders. Establishing a strong and consistent visual identity is often the difference between a good but unremarkable GLoGhack and one that gets a lot of attention. Use this design to lean into the focus of your game. While you’re here, think about graphic design and page layout- are you using space as best you can?

6. PREFACE

At the beginning of your hack, tell us what it’s about, as well as what you’re proud of in it or what are the novel developments in the hack. After you read a bajillion, it gets harder to pick out the differences, so putting a “shopping list” up front will help it stick in people’s minds and keep the attention on your hack’s focus and unique strengths.

7. CONSISTENT DESIGN LANGUAGE

This one is really subtle, but once your brain locks into it, you can’t get out of the mindset. Keep your language consistent. Is it “making a roll”, “rolling a check”, or “testing”? Is it a “class level”, “Class level”, or “CLASS LEVEL”? Is it “Armor”, “Armor Class”, or “Defense”? It’s a subtle effect, but honing in on the language you use and creating repetitive and reliable structures not only makes your game look professional, but subliminally easier to make sense of.

8. INTERWEAVE CREATIVITY

Throw in sprinkles of humor, prose, art, or in-universe quotes. Don’t just hit us with a wall of rules that sound like they were written by a lawyer. Invite us into your world, show us what your game is supposed to be like by example. This is your chance to show off your purple prose or poetic prowess, or perhaps give those stick figures you doodled a forever home. Have fun with it.

9. STEAL LOVINGLY

If you see something you like, a graphic style, an authorial voice, a mechanic, a class, take (giving credit) first and ask questions later. We’re all in it together, and if we wanted our ideas to be stuck in our own skulls, we wouldn’t have blogs and Discords. And please feel free to reach out to your favorite creators, GLoG or otherwise. We’re all just a bunch of friendly, excited nerds who like to talk shop about our projects and help our fellow hobbyists out. If you’re polite, you can probably get into some game design deep dives with the writers you really admire with ease. Build community for yourself. Play in other’s games, and offer to run your own. Read other hacks and offer feedback and praise. Be a creative force, a building force, a guiding force, a beacon of knowledge and kindness.

I’ll stop before I get too preachy. Hope that helped. Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.

Jojiro's Orthodoxies of Narration

I don´t have to explain what´s happening here. You´re not the boss of me.

Some noise is coming from a building.

-A tired Game Master somewhere, probably

1. Rewrite this, still as a single sentence. You want to convey that the structure is not sound. You hear the sound of rotting timbers wetly creaking from inside a poorly-mortared stone hovel beside you.
2. Rewrite this, still as a single sentence. You want players to picture a safe haven, a feeling of comfort that we get with freshly baked cookies at grandma’s house. But do it implicitly – “Grandma’s baking noise is coming from the safe haven” is not the point of the exercise, here. The sound of gently hissing fire meets your ears from the abode beside you, a familiar crackle.
3. Rewrite this, still as a single sentence. You want to convey that this location is mildly dangerous. As you hear the sound of gentle scurrying and scratching coming from the building beside you, you get the nagging feeling that you're being watched.
4. Rewrite this, no sentence limit. You want to convey that this location is lethally dangerous – try to suggest a different type of danger than what you used for exercise #3. As you hurry past, a sickening noise causes you to stop in your tracks- a scream caught in a throat, before the wet sound of steel cleaving flesh and meeting bone. A deep, infernal laugh rises from an inhuman throat as the unseen blade is forcibly removed from the victim, then as the chuckling subsides, the sound of rusted blade on grindstone. Something terribly unpleasant is happening.

5. The dungeon entrance is kinda big even to the humans in the party, but it positively looms over the halflings, like a bloated elephant. There’s even trumpeting and general cacophany to match! It’s a right circus in there. There seems to be an emphasis on the feeling of grandeur and an attempt to create a lighthearted tone, though I need a lot more context to make sense of how a dungeon could be circus-like; is it some form of literal funhouse?

6. As you round the bend, Martha, you hear the crackling of flame and popping of glass. The upstairs window that you spent much of your childhood daydreaming from bulges outward and shatters with a resounding crash, and the stoop where your mother always stood in the evening to greet your father groans as it folds in on itself. Mercerian levels of backstory are being engaged here, with an attempt in eliciting an emotional reaction from a single character. Fairy-tale nostalgia weaponized, to what could potentially be a very powerful effect at the table.

7. The floorboards creak and groan despite the party’s best efforts to stay stealthy. The incessant scuttling sound continues too. First in the wall. Then in the ceiling. Then down another wall, and finally to the floor beneath your feet. Cackling follows the scuttling, half a beat delayed. Dread, suspense, a folkloric horror. Scuttling is associated with natural creatures, particularly insects, and when melded with cackling definitely implies witchery. Plus the party is already being stealthy, so the strong implication is trying to stay out of the sight of a powerful witch, and failing.

A person hits a person.”

-That same tired Game Master, probably

8. Rewrite this, no sentence limit. The focus should be on a specific body part, the texture is meant to be visceral. You’re drawing out a moment and making the hit meaty and with impact. His fist soars, almost slow motion, down through the air. You watch as it collides with your lower abdomen, an instant ache blooming through your solar plexus. You stagger backwards, the wind knocked out of you for half a second as you struggle to regain breath and composure. He cracks his knuckles after such a direct hit, a sadistic grin exploding across his face.
9. Rewrite this, no sentence limit. The focus is on the person who hits, not the person who is being hit. The texture is something personal to the person who hits – you’re framing this as an important moment for them as a character. Your knuckles white, you take a steadying breath as you stare into those steel blue eyes that have haunted you for so long. In one instant, your body uncurls and springs into action, like a spring being released, and you strike forward with lightning precision and a well of determination. Your fist soars, colliding with his temple. You barely register the force of the impact as adrenaline courses through your body, and as he reels back from the blow, you take a moment to shake the pain out of your hand. You´ve been wanting to hurt him back like that for a while, and damn does it feel good.
10. Rewrite this, no sentence limit. The focus is on the scenery, and the texture is one of bleakness. Whatever combat is happening is ultimately pointless, and you’re trying to make sure the party knows it. Zoom out, make the fight less personalized, less meaningful. Distance your description. As your fists rain down blow after blow, pummeling her into the dirt, her dazed and empty smile directed almost past you, though you, mocks you. Dead silence fills your ears as you continue your senseless assault, your sinews losing their adrenaline and screaming in protest. (This one was tough for me, and I don´t think I did a great job, because I need more context.)
11. Rewrite this, no sentence limit. The focus is on conveying facts. There should be as little texture as possible. It’s the end of the session, everyone is tired, and while making this accurate is important, making it anything more would be a waste of time. You can see one of your players is already half-asleep. You may want to rush this and call it a night. Your blow connects solidly, and they grunt in pain. Alrighty, who´s next?
12. Rewrite this, no sentence limit. You are trying to focus on a pathetic target of the hit, but not like, an assault victim or anything serious. Tonally you’re aiming for a slapstick character who is the butt of jokes, bad timing, and who keeps getting beat on. This blow, which for most people would be considered but a light tap, sends this guy on his ass. As he goes to stand back up, you try and help him to his feet, but he slips out of your grasp and falls back the other way. You can´t help but suppress a chuckle.

I think the most significant thing I got out of this round is how much description relies on context. You build off of ideas you´ve previously presented, you frame descriptions in the same sorts of metaphors and highlight the same sorts of details, you slowly give sensory information over time instead of loading it all in at once. There´s a strange sort of poetry you can weave that you can´t convey with a three-sentence chunk of narration.

The Bismuth Birds

This, part 2.

BISMUTH BIRDS

Once, they were but greedy brigands, plundering wanderers for pennies and scraps of food. Then, something changed. They donned the Masks, and became a trio of inhuman, terrifying predators.

The Bismuth Birds look like a mix between pharaohs and plague doctors. Their Masks, wrought from bone, have large beaks and dark, cavernous eye sockets. Their bodies are coated in shimmering beads and gold-wrought chains, a decadent display of luxury. They are disproportionately thin and tall, looking like skeletal mannequins in some respects. They each use the names of the weapons they carry when communicating to others- the Axe, the Needle, and most terrifyingly, the Nails.

The hallmark of their presence is silence. They cannot be heard, even if they try. Nothing CLOSE to them makes sound. Thus, they specialize in ambush- twisting their bodies to fit into crannies, then slinking out to make brutal work of stragglers in the cloak of their wordlessness. In addition, their bodies are resilient to the point of being impervious- a story persists of a Dwarvish prospector, pouch loaded with adamant, fought off the Birds by stabbing them, detonating gunpowder near them, and pushing them down a mineshaft hundreds of feet, and yet they still tracked him down and took their reward.

The Masks they wear are the control pieces of GREED. GREED, as far as experts think, is a concept-made-entity. If the Masks are broken or removed from the Birds, their bodies collapse into a pile of valueless baubles and counterfeits. This is their weakness, and their most closely guarded secret.

As creatures driven by GREED, they can be bargained with. They cannot speak, so they write in lilting and off-kilter rhymes, like a particularly murderous child writing themself bedtime stories. Their favorite word is “more”. They desire riches above all, for when the Birds have amassed all the wealth in the world, GREED will die laughing, and reincarnate in the fire of their enemy’s hearts like a hateful phoenix. If they are paid ludicrous sums, they may be convinced to murder specific people as a byproduct of their wealth acclimation. However, their whims are inscrutable, and their employer may well be their ultimate target.

THREE PRINCIPLES OF GOOD MONSTERS

1. Numbers don’t make them interesting. “Ooh, this creature does 4 damage instead of 3! My players will be challenged by this.” No. Stop playing the numbers game with your monsters and think of different ways they can pose threats. Do they sweat lava? Do they ignore armor? Which brings us into principle 2…

2. Monsters don’t have to follow the rules, but they have to follow some rules. You don’t have to make monsters follow all the rules players do. If you want them to cast spells without expending points or making a roll or whatever, or if you think their attacks automatically hit anyone dressed in red, no one can contest you. What’s more important is that you can rationalize why the rules are broken. Maybe they are master assassins, but they come from a nation where everyone has tritanopia, so they can’t distinguish color outside of red. The players should be able to understand and exploit the mechanism the monster is using with enough research and cleverness.

3. Memorability over realism. Fuck Gygaxian naturalism. You don’t need to worry about filling ecological niches or mapping magical creatures onto real assumptions about biology. For crying out loud, dragons are solitary and yet hyper-intelligent! Throw what makes sense out the window; so long as your monsters are internally consistent and have moderately feasible relationships between them, no player will nitpick that hard.

Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.

GM Orthodoxies

 I'm on a blog-question-answering spree. Let's do this.

1. What's in the abandoned pantry? Mouldering bread, some fuzzy pickles in a revoltingly-colored jar, and a very large centipede.

2. Magister in the morning? He's still in bed with his husband. If the players were to wake him, he would draw the bedsheet around him and furiously point out that he has business hours in the coutrthouse, and the importance of following the gods-be-damned PROCEDURE for once instead of interrupting his home life.

3. Blue hair? I'd ask them why they want it, and work out a solution from there. Is it a motivation to emulate a pop culture character? A cry for individuality? Are they an artist who would find that fun to draw? Whatever the source of desire is, we can address it directly.

4. Description? When I describe things at the table, I tend to go for more "novel-esque" sensory detail in my description, leaving out some details to be discovered in play.. As the mid-afternoon sunlight filters through the verdant leaves, you see a vine-choked marble structure gleaming in front of you. The angular blocks imply dwarvish architecture, but the flowing dome and compact size show the structure to be a shrine. In the center, a small basin is filled with crystal clear water. Standing in front of the basin, wielding a massive golden spear, is a serpentine figure, flames curling off of its crimson scales. The salamander doesn't seem to have noticed you, what do you do?

5. "It's too tough"? If they need something in it, I remind them of their objective. "How badly do you want the Orb of Aggimoto?" Or some information they're forgetting. "Remember, you can get up to the balcony if you have a way to avoid the Ropecutter Hawks, and make your way around the basilisk den." If they're in the dungeon without a clear idea of purpose, I'd let them leave and explore other things. Usually my players don't back down- when you use the Timer Threat Treat method, you usually introduce enough variables into every combat for players to make sense of it all and triumph in the end.

6. Speak with Insects? In the moment, I defer to the player who wants to speak to the spider, because that sounds reasonable to me, and I'd rather reward them using their creative/roleplay abilities than hamper them with rules. I'd set the protester to look up the rule for next time to see what the book says, but I'd be willing to override it for the good of the table and that player's fun. Rules serve the game, not the other way around.

Try your hand at the Orthodoxies, and see what patterns emerge. Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.

In Praise of Single-Step Resolution

     First of all, I want to thank everyone reading. Last year, I got nearly 10,000 views on this blog and 100 posts out, which is staggering to me. I would have never anticipated this sort of productivity or this response, and it means so much to me that you're here hearing me ramble.

    Second, I wanted to talk today about what I inadvertently discovered about my GLoGhack MARROW (it's getting more and more complete and fleshed out every day, and soon I'm gonna transition into writing GM advice for new people to run this system well, so I think it's worth checking out) recently. As I was thinking about how typical MARROW play works, and why it runs so well, I came to a conclusion about the resolution mechanism that MARROW uses, and why it makes the game so darn speedy.

--If specific examples of the principles I'm going to discuss bore you to tears, skip this.--

    MARROW is roll-under. That means that all the necessary info is facing the player. They calculate the difficulty of their actions, make the roll, and tell me if it works or not. Now that might not be to everyone's tastes, but when I started to integrate this system into my game, I found it intuitive and fast because the step where the player asked me if their number was high enough was cut out. Keep a hold on that concept, I want to move on to another example.

    Another development in MARROW is how WOUNDS and STRESS occupy standard inventory slots. As the number of slots is so limited, the numbers are kept usually below 5, so that means that I could make weapons take up a number of slots equal to the WOUNDS they deal. Another benefit of this was cutting damage dice out of the equation. While they are fun to pile up and roll, I found that this step added calculation, and wasted time. MARROW removed the step where players roll for damage. Hopefully you're starting to sense a pattern here.

    And my third and final example: the tri-act system. MARROW lets players take three "actions", each one separated by the word 'and'. This makes things a lot faster. There is still a constraint on action, but there is a freedom from constraint that makes systems with maneuvers or bonus actions seem clunky in comparison. Instead of creating these artificial constraints and choices, MARROW's action economy puts that player agency center with an aggressive focus on cutting out the multi-step decision process.

--Here's the good stuff.--

    What's my point here? What's my thesis? Well, here's what I think. One of the core ideas that MARROW has captured for me is the idea of single-step resolution. Instead of having to jump through hoops and take overwrought processes to determine the impact an action has on the story (processes like, say, using an action to take an attack, then asking the DM if it beats the AC, then rolling damage, then rolling INT to cast a spell with a bonus action, then rolling extra damage from the spell), MARROW puts all the information into a single dice roll or action point (roll to hit under STR with the magic sword that deals 3 WOUNDS, with a -2 due to armor). That way, the narrative action is condensed into a single step. The benefits, I argue are threefold:

    1) Haste. It speeds up the game. One roll instead of two will take about half the time, and in the example above where I contrast an average 5e action vs. an average MARROW action, the difference could not be so stark. Once you get used to putting all the information needed to "set up" rolls early, you can get the blood pumping a lot quicker, which helps with the emotional tension of a game session.

    2) Narrative Clarity. Imagine you're swinging an axe in ICRPG. You bring the blade down on the demon. 19! You roll your effort and get... a 2. What a bummer! You already rolled well the first time, why doesn't that reflect as strongly on the narrative as the second roll does? With this one-stop-shop system, you don't have to worry about describing and making sense of that tension, you can

    3) Universality. The more you cut away, the more you'll discover your core mechanics. If you can set up umbrella mechanics that apply in a lot of situations in reliable ways, you'll get a lot closer to single-step resolution, and your game will be clearer and more cohesive.

    I understand that many people have emotional attachments to the multi-step systems, and sometimes they do have a lot of weight (like the ICRPG EFFORT system, which I would argue is worth the extra resolution granularity). But when you're designing your game, think about how you can cut out the maximum number of steps and get as much information into the player's hands about the rolls they're making as possible. Your game will be smoother and translate easier to the narrative space for it.

A footnote on pirate games

    One of the hallmarks of the pirate genre, besides being a very classic DnD structure (hero chooses to pursue some adventure hook or is tossed into it by fate, goes through ever more difficult challenges that result in the loss of more and more resources, then stumbles upon the final challenge and completes it with creativity and ingenuity to get a shit ton of treasure that is in inexplicably spent before the next movie adventure), is how much freedom the main character has. Their actions drive the story. Without their interference, nothing happens- no pirate movie if the pirate is stuck in jail with half a bottle of rum, the movie starts when they use that bottle to hold a guard at ransom and break out of jail and onto the rowboat with the old fisher and her daughter.

    So the first most important component is agency. For a classic nautical adventure game, characters should be given situations, not plotlines. The experience is made more rewarding when the players get to do exactly as they please, and live or die by their own hand. Otherwise, the whole thing feels inorganic, which is anathema to the way an adventure should unfold, particularly in this idiom.

    The other component is creativity. When you think to pirate media, the memorable moments are when the eponymous character makes use of the available resources to turn the tide. I have been running a pirate game for the past 6 months or so (which I will get to in a moment), and the same is true of an RPG. Instead of building in "ways out" or making the players reliant on the dice to do cool things, spend your time giving them tools. Describe the ropes and rigging on the ship about to plunge off the edge of the earth, hand the players a bag that miniaturizes anything put into it, describe a crack in the jail wall with a bundle of sticks in it. Create these little treats, and (this is important) DON'T GO INTO IT KNOWING HOW THEY'LL BE USED. Play the game and enforce consequences as normal, even letting the players miserably fail, and let THEM be the drivers of the creative use of these resources.

    Now, all that leads to the thesis: pirate games thrive on flexibility. In the plot, in the way that tools are utilized, and, in my opinion, most importantly, in the mechanics. If the players feel like they're in a system where the main way they can have agency is pushing mechanical buttons, like 5e, the game won't feel as organic and spontaneous as it has to. My pirate game started in 5e, and the further I hacked it away from 5e to get it run faster and more flexibly, the more my players have leaned in the the tropes and created memorable moments. Recently, I made the switch to MARROW, and that really made me see this issue in a lot of clarity, because the amount of freedom and agency the players have is so much higher, and that increases the engagement, as well as the drama.

That's all some nice talk, but how do you integrate it into your game? Well, here's a bulleted list:

    -Transition to a lightweight system. 5e works for many things, but it only serves to hamper here. Try something new, like GLoG, Black Hack, ICRPG, or any number of other lighter games.

   -When you're building your adventures, create a branching path with options with what happens if the players either succeed or fail in a given scene, with enough notes to flesh out the secret third option players always find. Be receptive to change- this flexibility and non-commitment to victory will be what will emulate the genre best.

    -Build tools into your encounters. Don't be literal or outright about it- a potion of health is a decent tool, but a strength potion is a much better one, and a potion of flight with a 7-second duration is even better. Give the players things that even you don't know how you would use. Let them use these things creatively, and be sure to reward them when they do it with mechanical advantages.

    -Let the players drive the story. Let them make up their own adventure hooks ("I heard there was a treasure below a volcano put there by a mad iron golem named Smee Shamil"), choose between multiple paths ("do we help the baron or kill him and hold his daughter at ransom?"), watch the world around them change to their actions and not the other way around.

  --

    Let my experience improve your game, and help you run the best damn nautical adventure you can. Let me know if you think of anything else down in the comments below. Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.

Building a dungeon for dummies like you and I

     You don't have time for fancy theory. You don't have the time to roll on a bunch of tables and plot out each room meticulously. Your session is tomorrow, and you've printed out some Dyson dungeon, with a sheet of coffee-stained notebook paper and a half-empty blue ballpoint as your weapons. You have to make something up, and fast. How will you do it?

NAME. Conquer the blank page. Scribble a name out. First thing you can think of. "Grotto of the Goblin King". There.

THEME. Look at the map, look at your name, come up with a sentence to describe the dungeon, then a single word (two if you really need it) to encapsulate the theme. "A mutated goblin has infested an underwater cave network, using its watery passages to dredge up old pirate's loot. Eroded."

KEY. Number your rooms, then write the number on your page. Leave exactly two lines of space for each room, or a single sheet of your paper of choice, whichever is less. Limit yourself. You won't be making expansive plots or complex puzzles.

CHECK YOUR MAP. See any rooms that immediately afford ideas? Write them down. Get a feel for areas that pop out to you. Visualize walking through the space, and when you have an abundance of ideas, move to the next step.

KEYING ROOMS. Keep things short. Describe things only in terms of what will spark your memory. You don't need a full description, just a few words. "Halfling corpse, goblin conveyor, 3 gobbos w/ slings, dirty syringe" could be all you need for an epic tactical encounter. Keep your theme in mind. If you don't have an idea, look at the theme and the rooms you've filled in. Not every room has to be amazing, many things you can breathe life into at the game table.

TTT. If you get lost, or falter, each room should have a Timer (what happens if the PCs wait too long?), Threat (what opposes the PCs?), and Treat (what can the PCs use to their advantage, or take with them?).

DOODLE. Draw the major features of each room on the map, even if you can't draw for crap. It'll get it to stick in your memory, force you to visualize each room so you'll better describe it, and generally work your brain in new ways. If you get a new idea when drawing, stick with it and run with it.

STATS. Choose the 3 most important monsters in the dungeon and stat them out or find an appropriate stat block. The rest, you can pull from memory or books you have on hand, or improvise. Likewise for traps, magic items, new spells, whatever. If there are more than 3, you can improvise the excess.

PENCILS DOWN. Once you've got most every room fleshed out, put your pencil down. Look back, at your doodles, at your two-line descriptions. How did it go? Does the dungeon feel complete to you? Is anything fun, or necessary, missing? Is there enough treasure? Enough traps? Read it all through and tweak what needs to be tweaked.

SPILLING OUT. "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if the Grotto were in a ship, and the PCs entering would push it off into the ocean?" Write down the excess ideas, the overarching mechanics, the random encounters, in the margins of your notes, or the map. Have them as a fallback, as an inspiration. Write as much as you can right on the spot, and no more. You can fill the gaps in later, chase your creativity.

YOU'RE DONE. With a ballpoint 3/4 empty and a sheet of notebook paper covered in notes about goblin doubloons and dead pirates, you're ready for that game tomorrow.

Check out this post, it's also quite good, if not more panic-motivated. Hope this gives you the motivation to write that adventure you've been putting off, and gives you a couple new tools.

On Awarding Treasure

    I've been doing an overhaul of how Classes work in MARROW, and as I've done that, I've been doing a lot of thinking about LOOT, and larger rewards. I was thinking about how to most effectively distribute rewards during campaign-level (10+ sessions) play, and I've come to some conclusions I'd like to share about how to make treasure more meaningful to the players and get the maximum juice out of it.

Pull it back

    By far the simplest and easiest advice I have is to drastically pull back both how much you give and the quality/power of the treasure you give your players. Do it WAY more than you think you need to. Every game, pull it back further and further. At early levels, mundane equipment and silver coins should feel like an achievement, and a single magic item could define not only a character, but a group. The players have no property, no titles, just a desperation to stay alive.

    Why should you do this? For one, it makes your job as a DM easier. If the players are constantly behind the curve and struggling, you don't have to worry about making encounters or story beats challenging, because the fact of the matter is that your players are underprepared. The drama arises from overcoming this disadvantage with luck, skill, and creativity, one of the tenants of why we play RPGs.

    For two, it makes the characters feel better and more heroic when they DO get their hands on treasure. Imagine you were told you couldn't eat pizza for a year, then given a single slice- would it taste better than if you were given a whole pizza in ten minutes? It's the same with treasure. While it might be temporarily filling, the really meaningful experience comes from that yearning and release.

Diversify your treasure portfolio

    This one is a tricky mindset to get into, and it plays into my next thesis. Treasure isn't just magic items and coin. It's mundane items, it's property, it's a title, it's a tattoo carved into your skin, it's the benediction of a demon, it's the map to an ancient vault, it's the key to the temple. Put a lot of thought and focus into making rewards in your game as diverse as possible.

    The reason for this is rather simple. If you put too many eggs in a small number of baskets, for example (a problem I often see in new DMs) only distributing gold and magic items as treasure, then those become less satisfying over time. The law of diminishing returns is your worst enemy in treasure, and diversification, along with a HEAVY pullback, is the best way to fight it.

    If executed correctly, your midgame and endgame shouldn't look like roving murderhobos strapped to the gills with gems and glowing swords but with no home, but rather better-rounded characters with a place in the world and a variety of assets at their disposal- favors, property, wishes, and yes, trade goods and magic items. Experiment with new types of rewards, and find out what works best for you so you can build a portfolio for your players.

Mechanical rewards are boring

    I will make a bold claim, and will refrain from backing it up or explaining it now, but it's an important assumption as I go forward with this bullet. RPGs are what happen around the rules. If you're just following the rules of an RPG, you are playing a glorified board game- everything that happens outside of the rules is your RPG gameplay.

    So, by that metric, any reward that only affects the mechanics of the game, with no flexibility, is not a fitting reward for an RPG. Within your diversification, you'll want to make a shift away from items that are purely mechanical in nature. Give the players items that have handwavey effects. Give the players items that are simply quirky. A knife that you can use to carve a boat with an hour's work is a LOT more interesting than a +5 sword, even though the latter may technically be more mechanically powerful.

    When creating your rewards, pull away from mechanics as often as you can. However, that's not to say to abandon the mechanics entirely, but when you do have to cater to the mechanics...

Tie treasure into the story

    What I mean by this is that every reward should have a role in the unfolding narrative in the game. This is your secret weapon towards making what would be a mundane reward in a lesser game something remarkable and defining. Let's turn to an example, the +5 sword I was talking about above.

    First, where was the sword found? The Red Crypts of Azgarr, you say? Great. This is a powerful sword, so it would make sense if it were a relic of the Fallen Paladin Azgarr herself. Already, we have an intense narrative hook- this is no glowing sword, but a crumbling relic of the bygone era, rusted with the blood of heretics and wrapped in dragon leather. If we were on a time crunch, this would be sufficient to make a passable reward that the players would at the very least remember.

    But we have time and mental space, so we want to expand and deepen this sword's place in the story to even out the mechanical focus. Azgarr probably wouldn't like her property stolen, and since the bloody masses of flesh patrolling the Red Crypts are manifested of her anguish, they want to repossess the sword. Monsters always attack the player wielding the sword. Bam. With that simple addition, you deepen the narrative of the dungeon and the loot in one fell swoop, AND create interesting choices- is the +5 bonus enough to warrant a target on your back?

    Without even altering the mechanics or naming the damn thing (which is a dirty tactic that almost never fails), we've mortared the blade into the dungeon, and created interesting choices as often as room-by room all from this +5 sword. Imagine what you could do with that pirate ship, those diamonds, or even that grimoire macguffin. Let the story drive your prep in the most interesting way possible, and your treasure will have dividends.

Make rewards a result of good play

    Think about, at any given juncture, why you're giving out treasure. What did the players do to deserve it? Sometimes, it's "look for the secret room", and that's a reward for careful play, luck, time expenditure, or whatever mechanics you have in place for that sort of searching. Sometimes, it's "a good negotiation with the powerful entity", and that's a reward for adept roleplaying. Sometimes, it's "the plot mandates that this would be natural or necessary", and that's fine- after all, in a nautical game, your players kind of need a ship!

    A bad answer would be "because they are in this room". What do the players have to go through to get it? What trial or challenge did they have to overcome? This is especially bad if it's in a main path, or one that's necessary to get to the climactic encounter- there's no challenge in securing it, there's no choice made to get it, it doesn't have any major implications. It's just there for the sake of being there.

    If I can impart no other lesson, TREASURE SHOULD BE A REWARD. It's not a trophy for playing, it's a result of making good, smart choices. Even if those choices are sometimes obvious, or the challenges barring the treasure aren't difficult to overcome, they should exist, so that all treasure feels earned. That's the best advice I can possibly convey.

I hope this post made you think about rewards in a new way, or consider new ways to attack its distribution in your game! I know that these five bullets will motivate me and my treasure-distribution for my campaigns. Thanks for reading, and happy gaming!

GLoGtober 22: GM Tips

 No, YOU fell off the bandwagon you built while following unrelated creative tangents. For Day 22, “GM tips”, this is my philosophy for designing adventures for other people to run. I’ve read through and used smattering of modules, and have been writing adventures for my blog for a bit.

1. Start with a no-nonsense run down of the adventure background and the PC’s goals going into it- save the cute little “keeping the GM in the dark” to preambles and book jackets.

2. From there, put on your “new reader” brain. What would you want to know immediately after reading the introduction? Start writing that, and carry forward. In what order would you need to learn the information in the adventure to best make sense of it or look it up during play?

3. Paragraphs, and even full sentences, are overrated. Keep the cognitive load as low as possible, and present as little information as you can, so the DM is comfortable improvising and has freedom while preparing and running the game.

4. Read-aloud text is overrated. A DM should get a feel for whatever it is you’re presenting within 10 seconds of starting to read the chunk, they shouldn’t need you to tell them how to describe it.

5. There are some hot tips as to how to notate things in your adventure for maximal use.

Complicated backstories: Paragraphs, though try and chunk relevant information under headers, and try and consolidate into a timeline or bullets if you can help it

Sparse rooms/overland map: table next to map

Dense rooms: Nested bullet points

NPCs: Fit the format they’re nested in. If in a simple dungeon, pop a couple words about them on the table. If they’re in a wall of bullets, go bullet format. If they’re on their own, short 2-3 sentence paragraphs are good.

Complicated if/thens: Flowchart

Sequences of events, past or future: Timeline

Something strange: A specialized (probably visual or table-based) model

6. Whenever you can, use roll tables. Roll tables have a few benefits: it offers DMs the option to choose options beforehand or customize the table to suit their needs of the adventure, it encourages a lot of ways for the adventure to be played and replayed, and it allows a DM on a time crunch to ignore all the results until they need to generate one instead of having a paragraph to read through.

7. Keep formatting consistent. Every time you have a room, follow the same conventions in notating it. Every time you have a piece of loot, keep your descriptions and language as consistent as you can, so you can pick up on the patterns when reading it.

8. Always include d6 or so twists at the end, little tweaks that change the adventure or add an extra moment of revelation for the players. It makes the module appeal to more DMs- if your core premise isn’t interesting, one of the twists might make the adventure worth running. Plus, it’s damn fun to roll and find out how the adventure gets flipped on its head while you’re prepping.

I hope that advice helps you when you write your adventures. I always like to see more amateur adventures released, so I hope this encourages someone to take up the mantle and write a short adventure or dungeon for the internet. Thanks for reading, and happy gaming!

GLoGtober Day 8: Mystery

 MYSTERY

Someone somewhere had a post about “6 mysteries in your campaign”. I can’t remember where it was, else I would link it here (if you know where it is, pop it in the comments), but it was about having 6 mysteries in your campaign that need to be solved over the course of a campaign. I think this is great, so I’m going to do this for my upcoming 5e game. Potential players begone!

Rime of the Winter Saint (My version of RotF for an upcoming 5e game)

1 What caused the eternal night?

Shortly after the campaign begins, the sun refuses to rise on the icy slopes of the Karzan Empire. This is because Saint Auril (saint of winter’s cruelty) has gone mad, using an enchantment in her holiest text, the White Codicil, to blanket the skies in perpetual darkness.

2 What drove Saint Auril mad?

Her heart was frozen in a ritual that let out a surge of chaotic magic. I'm undecided as to who conducted the ritual and why, but it drove Auril mad and warped the ley lines of the North. The original ritual-performer probably wants to warp the ley lines across the multiverse fr some nefarious purpose. Maybe it's Vecna. I actually like that idea. It's gonna be Vecna.

3 How can you cure her madness?

Kill one of her three forms, then take it to the duergar fortress and reheat it in the Stoneheart Hearth, an ancient Dwarvish artifact stolen from an abandoned city. To power the forge and thaw her heart, you need to sacrifice memories or emotions, but if you do, Auril will return lucid and capable of reversing the damage she had wrought..

4 How do you stop her enchantment?

The lucid Auril needs the Codicil and sufficient time to mount a countercharm. Unfortunately, she will be vulnerable, and many parties have many reasons to interrupt the ritual...

5 What’s up with those obelisks?

Obelisks of chadalyn (a mix of mithril and Shatterstar) dot the landscape at irregular intervals, covered in strange, ancient runes. These are connected with the surge of power, during Vecna's ley-line warping ritual. He harnessed the obelisks that were previously built by an arcane empire or some shit, and now they're letting out a low key psychic network thing.

6 What are all these wizards looking for?

The Karzan Empire is home to an influx of arcanists from all over, hailing from all sorts of orders and academies. They are here because they detected a massive surge of arcane power, scrambling the use of their spells and making their magics chaotic. This surge occurred at the same time Auril went mad, and the mages are trying to figure out how to harness the power for themselves. However, the secret subreason is that Vecna is sending out subliminal signals through the obelisks to draw arcanists in the hope of expanding the warped ley lines, and thus his influence.

And now I know what's up in my campaign. I hope this inspires you to put 6 Mysteries into your next set of campaign prep! Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.

Making Players Fear

I don’t think anyone would contest me if I said that the hallmark of being good at something, but particularly DMing, is to always be seeking improvement. You could be at any skill level at all, but the real marker of quality, in any sort of position or profession, is the burning passion to constantly get better and improve your skills.

All that to say that when I’m lucky enough to play instead of DM, or when I get the chance to see some DnD actual play or read blogs/listen to podcasts about/watch videos about DMing good, I’m always on the lookout for the next cool thing to steal for my game. I think I’ve stumbled upon the next cool thing I want to bring into my DMing style, and I think I know how I’m going to do it.

There were a couple moments in some games I was playing in when the DM introduced something rather simple or mundane, and it caused my brain to go into a spiral of theories and possibilities and contingencies and paranoia. You know when the DM says “there’s a green mist pooling around your feet” and then leans back and steeples their fingers while you start panicking? As a player, I really get into that sort of stuff, and yet as a DM, I typically find myself writing adventures with a more bombastic and cinematic style, not putting in these quiet moments like this where I can introduce vague and non-pressing challenges (or non-challenges). As a derivative of that, I’m not terribly good at mysteries or horror- my sense of timing and the tools I use to build encounters and adventures often make things too rushed, linear, and not emotionally/intellectually charged enough to live up to my expectations.

So I’ve written up a short guide as to how to make players cautious and afraid. Perhaps there are other secrets, but these are the ones I’m going to focus on.

• When you want players to slow down and think carefully, take away as many time restrictions as you can. As the time you have to make decisions decreases, the intensity of emotion increases, but the amount of careful thought decreases.

• Be sure to actually punish the players for bad decisions. If there is no weight to a poor choice, the players will never really care about making the right one.

• The best way I’ve found to introduce player paranoia, through my own player experience, is to introduce one very simple but malignant variable. Ones that I have fretted over are things like thick, heavy green mist (haven’t yet figured out what it does to this day), villagers who can’t remember their names, and a Groundhog Day-style time loop (the second and third days were trippy).

• Quantity over quality. Instead of one very complicated problem, light many small fires the characters have to worry about. They can be related, but it’s a lot harder to worry about the crab worms and the fire with eyes and the mist and the rune-marked door and the man with rubies for eyes…

• Often when you do that, the players start seeing connections and drawing lines you never would. Their theories, if they are invested in the game and creative/knowledgeable, can often be story gold you can mine then and there or down the line.

• That said, convoluted is not necessarily best. Again, simplicity is a virtue in these sorts of… not traps, but tricks. The complexity should come from the combination of variables, not the variance of a single one.

To that end, I’ve written a “short” 7-room dungeon to try and utilize these points. EDIT: Here it is, knock yourself out.

Loot as advancement, for dummies by dummies

 WHAT THE HECK EVEN IS LOOT ADVANCEMENT?

    Instead of levels and experience being tied to ephemeral game constructions like XP, or handwavey or subjective things like story milestones, loot advancement bridges the divide between diegetic apparency and objectivity. Loot advancement is where your Class levels are tied to the loot you require on an adventure. There are many more specific ways to do this, some of which I'll cover below, but the main concept is that you can find objects in the world of the game that give you your character progression.

WHY MIGHT I WANT TO USE THIS SYSTEM?

    There are many strengths to this system, but also a number of weaknesses. To address the biggest weakness first, loot progression takes away a lot of player choice in their character advancement. Instead of being able to wring their hands away from the table and looking forward to the cool things to come, the players have to wait and sit at the table to see what abilities they're going to get. This feeling of players having less say in their character builds definitely would irk a good many players whose fun comes from developing a character mechanically, and that's perfectly valid.

    In addition, since the advancement is tied to real artifacts in the world, there's a slim chance the players, through a string of bad decisions or bad rolls, will be forced to skip some of the treasure, or won't find hidden loot. Instead of getting rewards for simply playing, there's the extra challenge of playing well to get level rewards. Again, a matter of taste- you might feel bad if the party has a bad day or can't do what they need to do, wanting to give them a boost but with no easy way to get loot into their hands.

    However, there are a number of strengths. First of all, for those DMs (like me) who want to keep it all grounded in the narrative instead of having fiddly mechanics to worry about like XP, loot makes it super easy to ground levels in the world. Loot helps you more easily control what resources the party has and what tools you want to give them at a given time. Loot allows you to restrict player class choice diegetically without just saying "that's how it is in my world". Loot allows you to reward good play in new ways. Loot makes treasure more interesting, and makes it feel better to receive. Loot invests the players in the world: if they want a level in their cool homebrew class, they have to go in a library and look up where to find the appropriate loot. In that capacity, it also encourages players to make and pursue their own goals.

OKAY, HOW DO I USE LOOT?

There's a few options. You can:

-Have a piece of loot tied to a class. When you get your hands on the loot, not only do you get to keep the loot, you get the class level to have and to hold. This is the most generous option, and makes equipment very special indeed.

-Have a piece of loot tied to a class. When you get the loot, you can either choose to keep it as a physical artifact or convert it to a class level. This makes more choice: would I rather have a immovable rod or a level in Paladin? This is what I'm currently using in MARROW, for the most part, and I'm liking it quite a bit.

-Nix class levels altogether, what you are carrying makes you cooler. This is what ICRPG (the system I got the inspiration for loot progression from) does, and it has a lot of strengths and a lot of limitations. This method makes it really easy to cripple the characters with lootbreaking enemies like Rust Monsters. Players are a lot warier about inventory, and a lack of permanent abilities makes finding new tools/crafting foolproof plans a more appealing option. This is a bit too extreme for my tastes, especially because MARROW needs a lot of inventories to fill, but ICRPG uses it to great effect, another reason to buy the book immediately.

-Some fourth option. If you know of anything I missed, leave it in the comments!

Dedicated to BaaL on the OSR Discord, who asked how I do loot. I hope this helps illuminate some options, ideas, and pros and cons.