Shannon Rampe's Blog

I returned to tabletop role-playing games in 2022 and have absolutely loved playing and running games as a way to make friends and to have fun creating shared experiences together. In that time, I’ve run two campaigns and multiple one-shots, over fifty sessions. I’ve also tried to experiment with different approaches, running many different games and learning about and experimenting with different styles in an effort to refine my own style of running games.

Each gamemaster has their own distinctive approach to planning and running tabletop role-playing games. The more games I run and experience, the more I try to refine and define what appeals to me. There is no right answer, there’s only the answer that you and your players find fun.

So, heading into 2025, I’m taking what I’ve learned and leaning into these eight strategies to create games that are more fun and exciting for both me and my players.

What is a Narrative-Focused Game and Why Might You Want It?

Apart from loving role-playing games, I love stories. It’s what brought me to writing fiction and it’s what brought me to playing and running role-playing games. I have always loved the idea in role-playing games that the players and GM are forging a story together. To me, a narrative-focused game is a game in which the narrative matters.

That’s it. Story matters. It sounds obvious.

It’s so obvious, why even talk about it? Why wouldn’t you want story in your role-playing game? Isn’t that what the game is about?

We talk about it because a story in a role-playing game runs the risk of turning into a certain kind of trap. As a GM planning an adventure or a campaign, we tend to think up an overarching story that the players will engage with. And players begin to expect a story to be fed to them that they can follow along with. There’s nothing inherently wrong in that approach (most published D&D campaigns follow this format), except that it runs the very serious risk of falling into the plot trap.

That is, if you the GM have constructed an overarching plot—a sequence of events that forge a pre-planned story—you risk taking something powerful away from the players: the ability to make meaningful decisions. At its most extreme, this can devolve to railroading—that is, forcing the characters down a certain sequence of events in order for the plot to unfold the way in which you, the GM, planned it.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are games where there is little or no story at all. Where player decision is all that matters, and “character” motivation and decision-making is solely based on what the player thinks will be fun or interesting or challenging or make their character more powerful. This is your classic dungeon crawl.

These approaches to narrative can be seen in different styles or “cultures of play.” If you’re at all interested in this topic, I highly recommend you read this article as it has been very influential in shaping my thinking on this topic.  

For me the goal is to find a middle ground, where as the GM you have a hand in shaping the story, but the players’ characters and their decisions are what ultimately create what we traditionally think of as the “plot.” I want to run and play in games where the goal is to create a story at the table that is surprising for the GM and thrilling and fulfilling for the players.

That starts with the first strategy, almost a golden rule, which is to give players the ability to make meaningful decisions that impact the story.

The question is, how do you do that?

Plan Situations, Not Plots

First up is this classic bit of advice from Justin Alexander over on The Alexandrian blog. Go read it. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

Summary: a plot forces your players down a linear series of steps in order to solve a problem. A situation is a problem (or series of problems) without a scripted plan of how the characters will resolve it.

It can be challenging, as a GM, to prep situations without planned solutions. You may think, “what if I’ve made it too hard? What if I’ve made a problem they can’t solve?” And in that, you may be tempted to come up with ways they can solve the problem.

That’s okay if you have some ideas – you can use those ideas as clues (see the next topic on Node-based scenarios).

The truth is that your players will come up with approaches to solving the problem—the situation—that you could never have dreamed of. They’re going to do that whether you prep a plot or not, so save yourself the headache. When you plan for a situation, you may develop locations, NPCs, villains, factions, events, and hooks that might be relevant for the PCs. What you don’t do is make a plan for how the PCs will deal with the situation.

Trusting your players to figure that out will lead to sessions that leave you feeling surprised at how things turned out and your players will see that their own decisions shaped how the events—the story—evolved.

The “plot” – that is, the sequence of events that made up the story – happens at the table during the session.

In my Dragon of Icespire Peak campaign, the players were hired to clear a mob of wererats out of an old mine. I used the mine location provided in the campaign book and fleshed out the few named NPCs with motivations and attitudes. I expected the PCs to treat it like a dungeon crawl, clearing out the wererats room by room using spells and weapons. Instead, the PCs began to negotiate with the wererats. The PCs’ employer pressed the PCs to drive out the beasts, and the PCs wound up in an argument with one another about how to deal with the situation. Several of the party members left the negotiation and found a back entrance into the caves, where they were captured by a group of wererats. This prompted the other wererats to attack, driving the negotiating PCs out of the caves. Still disputing amongst one another on how to resolve the situation, they ended up betraying their employer and creating a temporary alliance with the wererats, helping to find them a new home. I prepped a situation. What played out at the table was a series of events—a plot—that I could never have planned.

Node-Based Scenarios

Okay, here’s another one from The Alexandrian.

When designing a scenario using a “node-based” approach (also called a spiderweb approach), you create a series of nodes – these are often locations but can also be NPCs, events, or other elements – which contain clues that direct the characters towards other nodes. By planting sufficient numbers of these clues, you can ensure that the players will stumble across some even if they miss others.

Node-based scenarios are ideal for mysteries or investigations, and since they contain contingency clues, you don’t have to worry about the classic linear mystery problem of the players missing an essential clue that leaves them scratching their heads.

Using node-based planning is a way that allows you to plan an interconnected series of elements without forcing you to prep a plot. It’s a natural outgrowth of the prior bit of advice about prepping situations. In fact, node-based scenario design is a tool for organizing situations.

In my homebrewed Planescape campaign, I opened with a mystery for the PCs – they lost their memories and needed to figure out how they came to be in the city of Sigil. Using various published resource, I created a series of nodes containing clues that allowed them to stitch the story together. Some of these were NPCs who had information, some were locations where they found journals and other artifacts from their pasts, and some were quests that needed to be completed in order to obtain things. The PCs missed the clues I placed for them at the start of the scenario, instead stumbling into a series of hazards and traps. But they soon encountered an NPC who helped them reach a different node and who was, herself, a node, since she had secrets about their past. The way in which the players puzzled their way through this mystery and the relationships they developed with NPCs along the way created a more satisfying narrative than I could have planned had I scripted the order the of events.

A Sandbox Shaped by the PCs

Many old school renaissance (OSR)-style games espouse the sandbox style, where the GM establishes a setting, randomly determining events, NPCs, and locations through rolls on random tables as the PCs explore a map.

This places the onus of agency and decision-making on the players, which is great. But without narrative consequences, are such decisions meaningful? That is, if the outcome of the players’ decisions is the results of one random set of die rolls versus another set, is that really a meaningful decision?

Of course, that’s an extreme version of an open sandbox. In fact, many things in a sandbox are fixed or at least have enough depth planned out for the players to make decisions that are less than totally random. And with some thoughtful planning and design, you can create a narrative-focused sandbox. Earthmote has some excellent advice for this on his YouTube channel. But the main tools involve creating factions and threats for the PCs to begin to engage with and care about. You still use random tables, but you customize those random tables to tie into factions (see below), locations, and events that might be meaningful to the players and their characters.

As you learn more about what drives the characters (see Leveraging PC Goals and Backstories, below), you will refine and revise these tables and the agendas of the factions will evolve and change over time.

Factions Tied to the PCs

One of the most powerful tools for driving narrative without railroading is the use of factions. A faction is an organization – a religion, a cult, a gang of bandits, a guild, even an evil wizard and his army– with a goal. Creating factions that the PCs are likely to want to help, who want to help the PCs, or who the PCs oppose, or who oppose the PCs, is a way of making those factions relevant to your gaming table.

The game Dungeon World was the one of the first games to make faction play a central element of the story. Each faction has a “front,” that is, an agenda they pursue which, if the PCs or other agents don’t interfere, will eventually come to fruition. For example, if nobody interferes with the necromancer’s plan to raise a dracolich that will destroy the kingdom, then it’s probably going to happen.

Finding or creating factions that the PCs are driven to engage with is critical to making them narratively meaningful. Let the PCs come to care about—or despise—a local town, then introduce a faction with plans to raze it. Will the party come to the town’s defense? Or choose to participate in the destruction?

 

Memorable, Recurring NPCs

One of the classic tools in a GM’s toolbox is a great NPC. To me, a great NPC isn’t one who is funny or weird or especially threatening – all of those are possible traits. But for me, an NPC needs to have a few qualities to be memorable:

They have to have one or two memorable personality traits – something you as the GM can use to bring them to life at the table

They have to have an agenda – just like a faction – even if that agenda is just maintain the status quo

They need an opinion about the PCs: do they admire adventures or loathe them? Do they see the PCs as an easy mark or heroes who can help? Their attitude can, and should, change over time.

The PCs have to care about them.

You can’t force that last one, but you can increase its likelihood by creating NPCs connected to the PCs backstories, relationships, and factions. Though sometimes, even a random NPC can become memorable.

By ensuring they have a couple of memorable qualities, they have some kind of agenda, and they have an opinion about the PCs, you go a long way towards increasing the changes that the PCs may come to care about them.

In my Dragon of Icespire Peak game, the party encountered Toblen Stonehill, proprietor of the Stonehill Inn, early in the campaign. I had decided that Toblen was manipulative and a flatterer, accustomed to conning the local miners out of their hard-earned coin. His agenda was that he wanted to get rich through seizing control of local mines. His attitude about the PCs? He saw them as dumb outsiders and believed that with a little flattery and subtle suggestion, he could turn their violent aims towards seizing control of a local mine from some unsuspecting dwarves. This served doubly by connecting some narrative tissue to one of the adventures in the campaign. The PCs were immediately suspicious of Stonehill’s motives. They spent several sessions trying to thwart Stonehill, who became a minor villain simply because the party disliked him! His attitude towards the PCs changed – he began to see them as meddlers and set out finding ways to make their lives more difficult. The Campaign Guide gives only three sentences on Stonehill which amount to “he’s good at running an Inn.” By giving him some personality, an agenda, and an attitude towards the PCs, I created a reason for the PCs to care about him and wound up with one of the most memorable NPCs of the entire campaign.

Leverage PC Goals and Backstories

Perhaps the single most effective way to create a narrative campaign but also one of the most challenging to do well is to encourage your players to create characters that are tied into the factions of the world through their backstories, and characters who have their own goals and wants. If your players all have characters with their own goals, they have done a lot of the work for you. Simply create obstacles, NPCs, factions, and locations tied to those goals and backstories and let your players go after what they want. The narrative emerges from the PCs actions and decisions.

You can make sure the achievement of those goals is challenging and narratively satisfying by pitting the goal against something – for example, the PC has been trying to recover the lost artifact from the demon lord, but to do so, they have to sacrifice someone or something from their backstory. Or maybe a PC discovering what happened to their missing brother requires facing down some unpleasant truths about their family, causing them to question who they are.

Avoid pitting PCs goals against one another, though, without careful consideration and discussion between players. That’s a good way to create frustration, boredom, and/or disappointment in the game.

One thing to keep in mind is that your players may not know enough about your world and your campaign to create well-defined character goals and backstory. They may need some sense of the hooks of your campaign setting – the factions, major NPCs, etc. – to be able to establish goals that make sense in the context of the game. Giving the players enough hooks in Session 0 when building their characters is one way to help mitigate this issue. Also, PC goals may evolve and change over time – that’s totally fine as well.

I recommend checking out Jonah and Tristan Fishel’s book “The Game Master’s Handbook of Proactive Roleplaying.” Ginny Di did a great video on this topic as well.

In my Dragon of Icespire Peak game, one of my players was a half-orc who decided based on our session 0 that he had never known his father, an orc, and that his human mother, on her deathbed, revealed that his father was a savage warrior from Neverwinter Wood who had been unable to sacrifice his life within the tribe to settle down with her in a human city. The PC resolved to travel to Neverwinter Wood to seek out the truth of his father and discover what had become of him. This gave me the perfect opportunity to make his father an important NPC in the campaign – an anchorite of the Cult of Talos, a powerful faction in the region tied to several key quests in the campaign.

What Is at Stake?

As an author, one of the ways we create compelling characters is by making sure our characters have goals and that those goals have stakes. That is, whatever the character wants or needs really, truly matters to the character. There are all sorts of ways to twist this – maybe the character believes something false or maybe achieving their goal will upset things worse than not achieving it – but the point is those stakes ensure that decisions made and actions pursued through the story are meaningful. They have teeth.

If you want to ensure your scenes and encounters are narratively impactful, try to clarify what’s at stake. Maybe it is as simple as the characters’ safety – this can be a powerful motivator – but oftentimes you can tie something else into the scene. The party has to fight a bunch of monsters in a dungeon. Why? What happens if they don’t do it?

If you have connected the scenes in your game to the factions, NPCs, and character goals you and your players have established as narratively significant, that question should answer itself. If the answer is, nothing happens, then why are the PCs there?

A word of advice about this practice: don’t overdo it. Not every scene needs to have crazy high stakes. Sometimes a scene of the PCs having a laugh together at the tavern or playing out a shopping session can be fun and relaxing. Sometimes exploring a random dungeon or chasing down a lead that goes nowhere can be an enjoyable aside. And sometimes, those unplanned and disconnected bits can provide the fodder for meaningful plot hooks you can deploy later.

What strategies do you use to draw your characters into your game and create meaningful stories and narratives? Do you have your own approaches? What challenges do you face? Let me know in the comments below.

If you liked this article, please share it with your friends. If you want more D&D and role-playing game tips, articles on sci-fi and fantasy, and a free short story, be sure to subscribe to my newsletter at https://www.shannonrampe.com/signup.

Part IV: Mid-Campaign Narrative

This blog series teaches new and returning Dungeon Masters how to run the Dragon of Icespire Peak (DoIP) Campaign from the D&D Essentials Kit and provides advice and guidance for being an effective DM. Check out Part 1 ,  Part 2 , and Part 3  of this series.

Introduction

By now, you’ve completed the “first act” of Dragon of Icespire Peak, by which at least two of the initial starting quests from the job board have been completed by the party and its time to move to the follow-up quests. By now, the PCs should be third level, which means they have selected their subclasses. It’s a great time to pause and consider how the next part of the campaign is going to go.

In this part of the guide, we’ll look at how to find the connections established in the initial adventures and develop them, building towards a climactic conclusion. We’ll also look at some factions in the region and how the story can weave in those factions.

Recap From Act 1

Think back over the initial few sessions and review your notes. Consider what happened in each session and pay special attention to the following questions:

What plot threads did the PCs pick up on? What did they leave untouched?

What NPCs did they side with?

Did they make any enemies who are still alive?

Did they connect with any factions such as the Harpers, Zhentarim, clerics of any particular faith, or others?

Which townsfolk did they gravitate towards?

Did any relevant PC background info come up during the sessions?

The answers to these questions will provide the fodder for the narrative development in the middle of the campaign.

Check In with Your Players

This is a great time to check in with your players and get some feedback. What parts are they enjoying the most? What would they like to see more of? Are there things getting in the way of the fun parts? Ask yourself the same questions and don’t be afraid to experiment and try out new techniques or approaches.

Set your ego aside about what “good game mastering” looks like. Here’s the truth: if you are having fun and your players are having fun, you’re a good game master.

This can also be a good time to revisit your players’ expectations on character death and other hazards. At level three, PCs have more tools for survival, but the encounters become a lot more challenging, and a well-timed critical hit can end a PC’s career for good. The threat of character death can add tension and fun to the game, but it can also be a downer if it happens senselessly in a random encounter or if a player doesn’t see it coming.

Campaign Structure – The Middle Campaign

Per the campaign guide, after the party completes two of the first three starter quests, you should put three follow-up quests on the quest board:

Butterskull Ranch Quest

Loggers’ Camp Quest

Mountain’s Toe Quest

It’s also very possible that the PCs can stumble into a quest that isn’t listed on the quest board at this point – the most likely one being the Shrine of Savras quest, since it is connected to the Mountain’s Toe quest.

Much like you did for the initial quests, we’re going to personalize these quests and give the PCs some narrative reasons to make choices. These could be connections to the townsfolk, an element from one of the characters’ backgrounds, or a complication or development from one of the initial quests.

You made notes about which NPC they liked or disliked. Make sure that NPC has an opinion about which quest they should go on next. You could have that NPC offer an additional reward, or you could connect it to one of the PCs backstories.

Here are a few ideas you can borrow to narratively spice up the second round of quests:

Butterskull Ranch

The orcs that ransacked Butterskull Ranch are likely connected to the Anchorites of Talos that will become prominent later in the adventure. If the PCs encountered orcs during the Dwarven Excavation quest, this could be an opportunity to have one of the NPCs in town make that connection.

Connect Big Al to one of the PCs backstories. Maybe he’s an uncle or a mentor.

Have Barthen or Stonehill tell the PCs all about the delicious butter “skulls” from butter skull ranch and how he’s missing his shipment. This is just weird enough that it might grab the players’ interest.

Consider how the orcs react to the PCs. They may be hostile initially, but the PCs may try to calm them or bribe them. Pick a random name for one and make it the figurehead of the PCs try to talk.

According to the campaign guide, these orcs were driven out of Icespire Hold by Cryovain. This is a good place to showcase the impact the dragon is having on the region. What do these orcs want? A place to call home? Wealth? Power? Let the PCs get creative and solve this scene without violence if they can, but don’t be afraid to have the orcs let loose.

Loggers’ Camp

This adventure comes with a built-in hook – Harbin Wester needs the PCs help delivering supplies to his brother. If the PCs need another reason, Wester can tell the party he hasn’t heard from his brother in awhile and is concerned, especially with the dragon in the region.

This is a good adventure to force the party to deal with a travel encounter, since trying to manage Vincent the Ox presents a fun complication the party has to manage besides killing monsters.

Make sure the party spots the boar, an anchorite of Talos in disguise. If they hunt or pursue her and happen to capture her, she assumes they are associated with the loggers or with Falcon’s Hunting Lodge and is immediately hostile. Have her hit them with a lightning bolt and flee. If they don’t choose to pursue the boar, ask for a nature or survival check to indicate that the animal was behaving strangely.

If the PCs don’t find the totem in area L2, make sure that Tibor Wester mentions this is very unusual behavior for creatures of this sort, almost like they were drawn by something. If they do find the totem, call for a Religion or Investigation check. On a success, share with the players that this totem appears to be associated with the cult of Talos, a chaotic evil god of storms and destruction.

Mountain’s Toe Gold Mine

This quest offers a fun opportunity to roleplay Don-Jon Raskin. Let him approach the party, having heard about their exploits, and try to recruit them directly.

The wererats are very dangerous unless the party has silver or magical weapons. To avoid a party wipe, make sure Barthen has stocked some new provisions when the party is in town – a couple of silvered daggers, silver-tipped arrows, and/or maybe a scroll of magic weapon.

I recommend adding some traps to the entrances to the caves. Unwanted visitors might step on some hidden spikes (DC 12 perception to spot and avoid) if they invade without caution.

The wererat encounter is a good opportunity for roleplaying presuming the party doesn’t go in with a mind to attack first and ask questions later. The wererats are willing to relocate to their old home, the Shrine of Savras, if the party will clear out the orcs and ogres that have taken root there.

Shrine of Savras

This makes for a challenging combat encounter and can give the PCs an opportunity to plan and execute a strategy.

It’s a lot of orcs with a lot of hit points. Consider using minion rules – give the orcs effectively 1 hit point each – or treat them like a horde using this Lazy GM technique.

Consider adding some details to make the shrine more mysterious – the ghost of a priest of Savras who is seeking aid to restore the temple seeks the PCs out, or the PCs stumble across the remains of a holy symbol of Savras.

If the PCs try to negotiate with the orcs and ogres, consider with the creatures might want in exchange for relocating. As an added complication, even if the PCs make a deal with them, there’s no guarantee the orcs and ogres will uphold their share of the bargain.

The divination vision granted by the shrine is an opportunity for more foreshadowing beyond the dragon. Think about what story beats you want to have happen later in the campaign – resolution of PC background stories, a battle against the anchorites of Talos, defending the town against invaders, or whatever – this is the time to foreshadow that with a strange and mysterious vision!

The divination shrine is also an interesting opportunity to incorporate a puzzle into the game. I had the shrine protected by Savras’ magic – anytime someone approached within 5’, the bell above the shrine would ring out, causing 1d6 sonic damage. The PCs could cast Silence over the area, cast any divination spell on the shrine to deactivate it, or remove the bell from the temple to solve the puzzle.

With each quest, try to create narrative hooks and connection points like this. Doing so will help to create a broader sense of purpose for the PCs and will reinforce their connection to the town and the region.

Travel and Unplanned Encounters

With the second-tier quests, the PCs are venturing further out from the relative safety of Phandalin, with multiple days of travel in some cases. They may want to start exploring locations you hadn’t defined. If that happens, consider adding a few random situations for them to stumble into.

Some quests suggest random encounters that might occur along the way, but others do not. You can use the tables in the Dungeon Master’s Guide to determine the chance of a random encounter occurring. Introducing some giant spiders, dire wolves, or bugbear hunters can liven things up when travel gets stale.

You can also use these travel events to introduce encounters that tie into…

Backstory Encounters, Personal Quests, and Side Quests

Now is a good time to start enriching the game’s narrative not just by connecting the job board quests as suggested above, but by expanding on them or adding new quests of your own devising. Ideas for these quests can come from the characters’ backstories, from agendas the PCs want to pursue, or as complications from prior quests.

In my campaign, for example, one of the PCs had in his backstory that he’d come to Phandalin because he was wanted in connection with the theft of a magic gem and he was on the lam. This presented a great opportunity to introduce a “random” encounter of assassins who came looking for him.

Another character might have a personal quest goal they want to achieve. You can add mini-adventures or encounters in to help enrich the story. Just be cautious about letting one character’s story take over the overarching narrative. The best way to do this, if it’s a long or complex quest, is to break it into multiple parts and seed smaller bits throughout the ongoing adventures.

Bringing back a monster or NPC from a prior adventure is a great way to enrich the story. It makes the world feel like a living, breathing place, and also shows the impact that the PCs decisions have on the story and the world. For example, suppose the PCs tried to kill Dazzlyn and Norbus or chose to negotiate with the manticore. The middle of the campaign is a great place to bring one of those characters back to make the PCs lives more difficult or to help them out of a tight spot.

That Pesky Dragon

It’s easy to forget about the dragon in the middle part of the campaign. It’s a distant threat. And while some of the adventures reference it, it’s possible the players might not choose those adventures. The campaign guide suggests having the dragon appear at random locations. I would suggest taking it one step further and ensure the dragon, or evidence of the dragon’s wrath, appears at least every other session. Show the dragon’s ferocity when the player’s stumble across the carcass of an owlbear, or the dragon’s cruelty when they stumble across the frost-covered ruins of a wagon train, or have the dragon fly overhead while they are resting at camp.

If the PCs encounter the dragon because of random luck, cause the PCs to make a DC 15 Wisdom save or suffer the Frightened condition. This should make them think twice about charging into battle. If they still proceed, you should warn them that their characters are aware this beast is dangerous and will likely kill them. If they STILL insist on fighting it, let them go at it. Have the dragon flee if it’s reduced to half its hit points. If it reduces one of them to zero hit points, let the dragon fly off with the PC’s unconscious body.

You did warn them, after all!

Factions at Work

One of the easiest ways to enrich and complicate the story is by introducing factions that the players can enlist or oppose. Consider the following possibilities:

Halia Thornton of the Miner’s Exchange is an agent of the Zhentarim. She could enlist the PCs to work for her, or, if they distrust her imperialistic intentions, they might become her enemy, prompting her to call in armed Zhentarim soldiers from nearby Yartar.

Sister Garaele of the Shrine of Luck is a member of the Harpers. The campaign book says she’s absent from town, but you get to decide whether that changes or not. If she is missing, perhaps someone else in town is looking for her and perhaps her disappearance has something to do with the Zhentarim.

The anchorites of Talos are a cult of orcs who serve the evil god of storms and destruction. They have made a base at the Tower of Storms and seek to exert their influence over the region. The PCs are likely to encounter anchorites or their influences in the middle tier of adventures and will certainly encounter them later in the campaign. Making them an ongoing and direct threat to the region and to Phandalin will make those adventures more personal and meaningful.

If you plan to run any of the follow-on adventures that take place after the events of the campaign (Storm Lord’s Wrath, Sleeping Dragon’s Wake, or Divine Contention), consider introducing the Cult of Myrkul and factions of undead in this or later parts of the campaign as a way to foreshadow the events of those adventures. You don’t need to know too much about those events, but knowing what factions are involved is useful.

The adventure at Icespire Hold has the party facing down a rival band of mercenaries, the Stone Cold Reavers. You can make that encounter a lot more meaningful if the PCs encounter the Stone Cold Reavers earlier in the campaign. Maybe they start a bar brawl in Phandalin and the PCs drive them out. Or maybe they take care of the contracts the PCs miss, serving as a rival adventuring party.

In each case, treat each faction like a NPC - consider what the faction seeks in the region, and what their opinion/attitude is about the party. Their goals and their attitude can change over time and in response to the PCs decisions and actions.

Introducing factions for the PCs to serve or to act against will give a sense of a larger narrative momentum and consequences beyond those of the immediate task on the job board.

Nothing is Static

As referenced above, make sure the actions and decision of the players reflect in the characters and events they encounter, especially in Phandalin. Likewise, make sure the town changes over time. Townsfolk come and go, especially in a frontier town like Phandalin. New people arrive. Regulars travel out of town. The regular residents will come to recognize the PCs and know of their exploits.

Let the world live and breathe, changing over time, especially in response to the PCs actions and decisions.

Final Tips

There’s a lot here that you can add to the adventures. Be careful not to go overboard. Let the campaign develop and grow in the ways that seem interesting to you and your players. You don’t have to shoehorn in every element of every character’s backstory or every potential enemy. Use what serves you and your players and dump the rest. Try adding one or two elements per session and see how it goes.

Don’t be too coy with your players. Sometimes as GMs, we want to showcase our brilliant ideas by having our players gradually figure out the secret plots and hidden agendas of the factions at play. Here’s the truth.

Players miss stuff. Lots of stuff.

Don’t be afraid to just explain what’s going on. Give them the clues, and then suggest to them what the clues mean. If you’re afraid this takes away agency from the players, explain that their characters are the ones who have pieced things together.

For example, when offering a clue that suggests Halia Thornton might have plans to turn Phandalin into a Zhentarim fort, tell the players that one of their characters notices a Zhentarim coin on Halia’s desk and tell them who the Zhentarim are and what kinds of wicked stuff they get up to. Spell it out for them, because the characters are likely to know stuff that the players would not. And with everything else they’re paying attention to in the game, it’s easy for players to miss narrative details that seem obvious to you.

Finally, remember that you don’t need to, and shouldn’t try to plan for every outcome. You’ll save yourself a lot of time and energy if you remain open to the ideas the players want to pursue at the table. It might seem stressful not knowing what’s going to happen, but it gives you an opportunity to be creative and it lets the players feel like they really can try anything!

Good luck and have fun!

 

So, how is your campaign developing? What unique stories are arising in your game that aren’t in the campaign guide? What parts are your players finding the most fun? What about you? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments.

If you want more D&D and role-playing game tips, articles on sci-fi and fantasy, and a free short story, be sure to subscribe to my newsletter at https://www.shannonrampe.com/signup.

 

A popular bone of contention is discussions of game mastering advice is around the concept of rulings versus rules. It has sparked many a lively Reddit discussion as well as more thoughtful consideration from folks like Justin Alexander and others. Some games even go so far as to take a position on this, leaning into the "rulings not rules" mantra.

I'm going to attempt to sidestep the argument. There's nothing wrong with rules. There's nothing wrong with rulings, either. Both are necessary in a role-playing game. The balance is in understanding what the advantages and disadvantages are of each approach and then finding when and how to leverage them. And it is a balance, and the balance will vary from one game master (GM) to another and from one table to another.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Rules and Rulings

Let's establish some linguistic clarity first, shall we?

When we talk about rules, we are talking primarily about the operational mechanics of the game. These may be printed in the rule book of your role-playing game of choice, but they may also be established house rules your table plays by. This includes everything from conflict resolution, progression mechanics, narrative mechanics, and everything in between. There is a shared expectation of how the mechanics of the game work, and that shared expectation is codified in the rules. They apply to both players and GMs, though each may leverage, adapt, or be bound by different sets of rules. A rule is what tells us the area of a fireball spell, how many hit points a goblin might have, and even how to use mechanics like Inspiration and Advantage in a game like 5th Edition D&D.

When we talk about rulings, we're specifically referring to the GM's role in adjudicating situations. Adjudication comes into play in the basic operation of a role-playing game, but we don't talk much about it. That basic operation looks something like this:

The GM describes a situation

The players describe how their characters react to the situation

The GM describes the outcome of the character's action, which, if uncertain, may require rolling dice

The GM describes how the situation has changed, prompting a repeat of the cycle

It's that number 3 that is the sticky wicket. Because, rules or no rules, EVERY interaction between a player and a GM goes through this step number 3 and step number 3 requires what? You guessed it: adjudication, i.e., making a ruling.

They do this by leveraging the rules, which provide guidelines on how to adjudicate the situation. The amount of adjudication versus how closely the game hews to the rules is going to vary by the nature of the game and by the GM. Some games are very explicit on the mechanics while others encourage you to decide the specific outcome yourself. Likewise, some GMs and tables prefer to hew closely to the rules while others treat the rules as a loose guideline.

Dragons from Scratch GM Christopher Campbell sees it this way: “I look at the rules as an indication of the designers’ framework for the power level of the game. For example, proficiency bonus in D&D has a likely ceiling for an attack bonus to reach about 14 at level 20 (+6 proficiency; +3 weapon; +5 stat). So the RULE gives me an intended range of around 1-14ish. Cool. Framework/designer intent established. Now I can make a ruling that a Dark God can have a proficiency bonus of +20 because I view that to be in line with the power level I wish to bestow upon it. But I came to that ruling after seeing the rules and gave it a bonus that I felt accomplished my goal, even though it wasn’t technically something the rules covered or allowed.”

But why do we need rules at all? Aren't RPGs about shared storytelling?

Well, yes, they are, but the thing that makes a role-playing game a "game" and not an improv session is the existence of rules. (Though even improv has rules, which begs the question of whether improv is a game itself, a topic for another article.) Rules establish the guidelines for when and how we as players and GMs do things within the game. GM rules are different from player rules, and as GMs we often have more flexibility to change, bend, or adapt the rules to meet the situation, but that establishment of guidelines and boundaries is one of the key purposes of having rules.

It's not the only one. The second benefit of having rules is that it helps to establish the framework of the shared creative space. Rules help to create clarity in the imaginations of the players and the GM. If I, the GM, tell you that the evil wizard points at you and fire shoots out of his fingertips, you the player are going to want to know if your character is at risk of getting hit or not. The rules can help to tell you that (the wizard cast burning hands, range 15', you are 10' away, hence you are within the area of effect of the spell, etc).

A third benefit of rules, rarely discussed, is the mental load rules save the GM. GMing can be hard work and requires lots of creative energy. Making rulings increases the mental load on a GM. Leaning more heavily on the rules to adjudicate a situation can give the GM’s brain a tiny break!

“Take a fight with a group of Ogres or a well-written, pre-planned mechanical trap,” says Campbell. “The Ogres smash things and the trap does what it's programmed to do. I don't need to think of the ogre's deeper motives or witty banter nor the ‘grand plan’ of the trap's secret occult design. They just run their programs. These can still be fun encounters for everyone. But I can take the 20 or so minutes for the first 2 rounds and give my brain a breather before jumping back into the fight/trap and mixing things up for the second half. When the ogres do ogre things and the trap does trap things, the creative mind gets a beat to reset, step back, and plan next steps as the rest of the tactical mind just runs the program and the rules as written.

“Is it possible that some small situations will pop up that require more intense adjudication? Sure. RPGs always throw curveballs. Expect the unexpected. But the chances of the rules doing most of the work for us in a situation like this are usually higher than if we are running, let's say, an intense RP dinner party with Strahd von Zarovich.”

Going back to our four-step operation between GMs and players, when the GM makes a ruling, they should generally consider what the rules say, adjudicating the situation accordingly. But what if the rules are silent on the matter? The D&D rules say zilch about investment in fantasy real estate, but your players might want their characters to become real estate tycoons in the Forgotten Realms. So how do you handle this situation? Well, you either have a passing dragon burn them to a crisp so you don't have to deal with it, or you make a ruling.

Some games actively encourage the "rulings over rules" approach. In a game like Shadowdark, the rules are lean and sparse and rely more on GM adjudication, actively encouraging it. Consider conditions that can affect a character, like Poisoned or Stunned. In D&D, there are extensive rules on how to address each of 14 different conditions. The Exhausted condition alone has 5 paragraphs of text and a table! Shadowdark, in its rules on conditions has four sentences intended to address the topic entirely. In fact, these four sentences can be boiled down to two: "Advantage and disadvantage apply to most situations. Use common sense." That is a dramatic difference in approach between two games that otherwise look similar on the surface!

Another situation in which rulings become especially important is when the rules get in the way of the fun. Rules can slow down the game, by forcing players to spend time measuring distance, consulting detailed spell descriptions, rolling multiple rounds of dice, etc. Additionally, rules, while helping to establish boundaries on the shared creative space, can sometimes stifle creativity. This is when the dramatic, exciting moments of a fierce battle between the party and a band of bloodthirsty trolls devolves into a series of numerical interactions and dice rolls.

In these situations, it can be advantageous for the GM to simply make a ruling to keep things moving quickly or to amplify the drama. This ruling may lean into the rules but more likely disregards the rules in exchange for pacing or for maintaining the fiction.

However, before deciding to simply lean fully into rulings and ignoring the rules entirely, consider the impact on your players. Players have an expectation of how the gameworld works, that expectation being established by the rules. Abruptly pulling the rug out from under them by making a ruling that ignores or violates the rules can make players feel like their decisions don't matter. And nothing is more destructive to the fun of the game than robbing players of their agency.

This is one of those topics where there isn't an either/or answer. The point is understanding how the rules work, why they are there, what you gain from having them and what they cost you. As a GM, the most important thing you can do is to understand what your players like and want, and communicate how you run a game. If you run fast and loose with the rules but your players like a tightly structured game leaning into tactical combat, and you fail to understand this, you're liable to come into conflict. Conversely if you and your players are clear about what kind of game you like to play and run, that shared creative space is going to be a lot more fun to play in together.

What do you think? As a GM do you lean harder on rulings or rules? What advice would you share with other GMs? What about as a player? How do you feel about the GM making rulings? Is it thrilling or frustrating?

If you enjoyed this blog, please like and share it on social media. If you want more content on game mastering, follow me at www.shannonrampe.com/signup and the GM Cellar YouTube channel.

#ttrpg #dungeonsanddragons #dnd #gmtips #gmadvice #dungeonmaster #gamemaster #dmtips #dmadvice #shadowdark

Ben Riggs is a tabletop RPG historian and author of the excellent and well-researched book, Slaying the Dragon: a Secret History of Dungeons and Dragons published by Macmillan in 2022. On January 3rd, Riggs shared a lengthy post on Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit that was later shared on ENWorld in which he claimed that the Golden Age of tabletop role-playing games was at an end.

The post went viral and spawned a bevy of responses from community members and content creators. Riggs himself talked further about the post in the latest episode of his podcast, Plot Points.

On January 23rd, I had the opportunity to speak with Ben about his book and about his predictions for the future of the TTRPG hobby. Part 1 of this interview appeared on the blog on January 29th. You can find it here. The second half of the wide-ranging interview is included below. Be sure to check out the first half if you haven’t read it yet!

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Ben Riggs: My current understanding is about 18 months ago, Cynthia Williams, who we should think of as an Amazon person more than anything else, began hiring Amazon people to start working at Wizards of the Coast and these Amazon people are Amazonifying Wizards of the Coast and the changes that they are making seem to be deleterious, ill-conceived, and arrogant.

These people seem to believe that the reason that D&D was a failure in the past was because book-addled idiots made it. And now that they, the Amazon people, are going to make it, it will be successful because their magic dust will simply be sprinkled over D&D and it will instantly become a billion dollar property. And their magic dust is so amazing and so special, they don't actually need to learn anything about D&D. It is simply their fairy dust that will make the change.

And in my experience, when people who think that it is simply their fairy dust that is necessary get control of D&D and those same people think that they don't need to learn anything about D&D and those same people are also obsessed with extracting as much money from D&D as they can, things get messy.

I have no objection to them making as much money as possible. I want my Edgin the Bard socks. The problem is they just seem to be going about it in a really weird way.

They posted a job for I think this is a VP of Marketing and it said the VP of Marketing had to have subscription drive management experience and you're like, “What do they need someone who knows about subscriptions for at D&D?” And we all know, right?

Shannon Rampe: Right, D&D Beyond.

BR: They want it to be a digital walled garden where we're all subscribers. Which, if they made an amazing product that we all want to buy, I'm excited about that. But I'm deeply skeptical.

Should I tell you about when they tried to do this before?

SR: They did this. They attempted to do a virtual tabletop in 4E, and it was a disastrous failure. It never materialized and that was the entire pitch for 4E, “You’re going be able to play D&D online with your friends.”

BR: I'm trying to remember the amount of money I was told they spent. I forget if it was $70 million or hundreds of millions of dollars, but they spent an insane amount of money and essentially got nothing out of it because Wizards of the Coast at the time was primarily a company that published books and printed cards on paper, and there were three parts to what they wanted to create.

They wanted to create a social network. And they were doing this at a time just after Facebook but before Twitter, I want to say. They wanted to create essentially Steam where you could buy video games through Wizards of the Coast. And they also wanted to create a virtual tabletop and this company again doesn't make software. They had to go out and hire people and they got nothing out of it because it was just way too ambitious.

But I am concerned they are making the same mistake again. I don't play a lot online, but it would certainly seem like instead of creating a competitor, you maybe just buy something, a virtual tabletop that already exists.

When I talk to other players—thank god I'm a 7th and 8th grade teacher and I work with a bunch of people under 30 who play D&D. It's just so great to be able to go and talk to them and be like “How do you do it? What are you guys doing?”

And for most of them, they're like “We play online and we like it just fine, but we'd much rather play in person,” and it certainly seems to be that a lot of people just prefer playing in person.

So, as cool as it is, I just don't know. I would love to know if they did market research on this before they spent hundreds of millions of dollars.

SR: I think the pandemic made suddenly an explosion of people playing together online because that was the only thing that they could do.

Having done both, having played online and in person, there's no question. Anybody that has played online and in person will tell you that the in-person experience is hands down better because of the energy that you get of being in the same room with people, the ability of people to talk over each other and all talk at once, which you can't do on a virtual call. Even the ability to look people in the eye when they're talking, which you can't do on a virtual call.

You lose all those things, but you gain the ability to play with people all over the country and, in the event of a pandemic, obviously you gain the ability to play with people.

You know, recently Wizards put it out a “maps” tool, which is kind of like a shortcut version of a virtual tabletop. It's very similar to a product called Owlbear Rodeo, which is a free-to-use virtual tabletop. It's very bare bones. You've got maps, you’ve got tokens, and that is basically it. But I actually like Owlbear Rodeo for online play.

I was kind of surprised to see them take the effort to put out a product like that when I know that they're leaning so hard into this 3D VTT software creation that they seemed to be pushing so hard last year. But maybe they just did that because the VTT is not coming along quite as well as they would like, or it's software development and it takes a long time.

I want to talk about Slaying the Dragon, but before we switch over to that, is there any anything else you want to add about this, your predictions of the downfall of civilization, or at least the downfall of D&D and the subsequent decline of the some of the growth that we've seen?

BR: My short answer is no. My longer answer would be that this process, posting this, seeing the response, has me more concerned that I'm right. Which I take very little pleasure in. And seeing how this went crazy, I've given it some thought, and it'd be very easy to take every piece of news and filter it through this lens and be like “See, this proves me wrong” or “This proves me right.” You know, I'm just this irritating peg on the Internet constantly telling you if things are good or bad.

And I thought about it and every January, now, I'll write one of these.

SR: The state of the industry.

BR: I'll take a look at the year before and be like, “So how does this fit with what I said?” And if I'm if I'm wrong, no one will be happier than me. I would love it if the special time that we've lived through continued.

But I'm going to tell you. Since I posted it, number one, I didn't see a ton of really convincing counters. Two, I just keep seeing stuff that really seems to fit this idea.

It's hard to get sales members, right?

The only sales numbers I really have are a ton of D&D ones and a ton of Traveller sales numbers because the creator of Traveller, at some point he just seems to decide that you're worthy of getting sales numbers and mails them to you if you're a historian. I got them in the mail and I felt really special!

And then I talked to Shannon Appelcline about it and he was like, “Oh, he sent those to me years ago. Here they are in digital form.”

I'm like “Oh, thanks Shannon.”

So, I charted the decline of Traveller sales in the early 1980s and then I paired it to the decline of D&D sales in the early 1980s and shock of shocks, they matched up really really well.

In between 1980 and 1986, it's not like they're perfect mirrors, but they both had their peaks in 1981, and by 1986 they had both radically declined.

And I look at that and it's what I would have guessed based on everything we said. Where just it logically makes sense to me that if D&D is doing poorly, other games are going to do poorly too. But I was like, “Hey, here's some actual data backing up that idea.”

I guess that the last thing I would say is I'll write something about this every January, but I've regrettably hardened in my position, I think.

Did you know that Critical Role viewership is down?

SR: I did not know that. I don't really follow Critical Role.

BR: Me neither.

SR: It wasn't something that I was super paying attention to.

BR: I would agree, it's not something I super pay attention to either, but viewership is down for this third season, and I have no idea how that fits into my idea because it's not like it links up or something. It's not like the OGL crisis happened and people stopped watching Critical Role.

Some fans have been like “This season is just too jokey. There's no straight men,” are some of the reviews I've seen. But the TTRPG industry seems to be one where the rising tide carries all boats and things are best in some ways if everyone is doing good at once. It's not like you either have to buy a Coke or a Pepsi.

You can buy both.

So, when I got the thing about Critical Role moving past D&D wrong, I started doing a little research and I'm like, “Wait, Critical Role’s numbers are actually down?” Their best day in the past six months was January 19th, a couple days ago and I assume it was because of the weather. I would assume that there was terrible weather so people were like, “Well, I might as well go watch Critical Role.”

SR: Well, it’s another pandemic factor, right? Critical Role peaked—again, purely anecdotally, I don’t have the data on this. But it seems to me that Critical Role reached its height of popularity during the pandemic when people didn’t have anything else to do besides sit and watch 4-hour long live streams of

other people playing D&D.

BR: You would be totally correct. Let me tell you right now, because I have the numbers right in front of me. They shot up in March of 2020, surprise, surprise, and had incredible growth from then until they peaked at October-November 2021 and since then it's been down, down, down, down, down, down, down.

You can't expect the pandemic numbers to persist forever, but they've been going down for two years now. And a two-year trend of down, that's not great.

So, my point here is simply—and I’m not fitting this into some larger theory—but I don't like that! I'm not even a Critical Role fan or viewer, but I'd much rather have them continuing to grow. And what is changing that? Because I would have said that Critical Role’s whole thing was “We’re good at sucking people in and getting people excited.”

What has happened in the past two years to stop that growth? I have no idea, but it's not a good thing.

All right. I'm done preaching.

SR: It's good stuff.

SR: Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons and Dragons. I completely devoured this book. I got it on from the library as an audio book last year, and I couldn't stop listening to it. I was like listening to it in the car. I'm listening to it in the shower. I'm listening to it while I'm walking around the house. I'm just sitting around in my house listening to a book which is a little weird, but I just couldn't stop. I listened to the whole thing in two days and I just thought it was really terrific.

I started playing in the red box, Frank Metzner-era of D&D and played every edition up to now. I started in the late 80s, so I didn't live through the early stuff. I was alive, but I wasn't aware of what was going on.

So, it was fascinating to me to read the details behind a lot of stories that I've heard anecdotally or observed myself. I've read some of Shannon Appelcline’s articles and other things here and there, but nothing quite so comprehensive. Certainly nothing with the behind-the-scenes interviews with all the creators, the financial numbers that you had.

So, it was just a terrific book. I've been recommending it to people left and right. Basically, anybody that's interested in D&D or role-playing games, I’m like “You gotta read this book!” So, bravo on writing a really great book.

BR: I can't tell you how much I appreciate your kind words and keep telling people about it because, I look at novelists and I'm like, “You guys can pump out a novel in the year, maybe two years if you really go and take your time” and I'm like “It was five years.” And people are like, “So give us a sequel now,” and I’m like, “Give me another five years!”

SR: Yeah. Well, we'll get to that.

I know you interviewed lots and lots of people for this book, but you had a fairly focused mission, which was about the rise and fall of D&D as a brand, and ultimately the sale of the company to Wizards of the Coast in 1997.

Are there some stories from the book that you loved that didn't make the final edit because you were trying to keep on focus? Any like real gems where you're like, “Gosh, I really wanted to put this in, but it

just didn't fit”?

BR: The short answer is no. I basically put all the good stuff in there.

I guess I wrote 30,000 words on 3.0 or something like that. And that just went beyond the purview of the book. It was cut because it really didn't fit. I guess that is kind of what you're asking.

It was cut because it didn't fit the narrow mission of TSR, but I'm sure that’ll see the print sometime somewhere. And if you're really interested, if you Google “3rd Edition…” I did a seminar at Gen Con on 3rd Edition. I put it on my podcast. I think it's also on YouTube in some form, so if you poke around you can find me at least talking about that for an hour.

SR: I'll take a look for that and hopefully that will appear in a book form. I think you've told the history of 1st and 2nd Edition in a very complete form, but the acquisition by WOTC, the creation of the OGL in the first place, the explosion of D20-based products in that era and then ultimately the decision by WOTC to publish 4th Edition and that whole saga and then the spinoff creation of Pathfinder, kind of as a result of that, there's a book in that too.

When are you going to give us the next installment? I hope that's in the cards.

BR: I'm just going to keep writing. I couldn't tell you when it's going to be done. I'm just going to tell you I keep talking to people, I’m still interview people, still writing and it'll be done when it's done.

It's a little bit harder because there's no natural end point and I do feel a little lost at sea because I had the clarifying question of why did TSR fail? last time, and this time it feels more like, well, “I'm just going to keep going.” And that can be satisfying and I can still get good stuff out of it, but it feels a little less like I have a knife to clarify things.

SR: Yeah, I can see that. I mean, there's WOTC being sold to Hasbro, but the then there's so much that happens since that acquisition that it's hard to see a clear dividing line. Well, regardless of what it is, I hope to see it.

What kind of response have you had from people from the TSR-era? Either people that you interviewed or people that you didn't, and have you ever heard, or did you ever get to speak with Lorraine Williams?

BR: Joe Manganiello did.

So, one day I'm just eating dinner with my two-year-old and my wife. My phone rings. I'm like, “California number? OK, I'm just going to do it. I don't know why, but I'm going to answer the phone.”

And the voice says to me, “Hey, Mr. Riggs. How was school today?”

I'm like, “Who is this?”

“This is Joe Manganiello calling.”

Good Lord, Joe Manganiello is calling me during dinner? This is weird, but very, very flattering.

And he was calling because he was like, “Hey, I'm interviewing Lorraine Williams on Friday. If you could ask her one question, what would it be?”

And I was like, “How about I send you 3 pages worth of stuff?”

I'm never going to interview her. If I did, I don't know what I would do with it. He's working on his D&D documentary which I'm assuming is coming out this year. So, there's no point in me holding anything back and being proprietary or anything like that. I just sent them everything I had, and I have no idea what she answered, what she didn't, really what she said. To find out you will have to go and see Joe Manganiello's D&D documentary, so everybody go see Joe!

SR: I'm sure I will when it comes out!

BR: But the response from the TSR staff has been pretty universally positive. It was a point of extreme dread for me because here I am writing about this thing as an expert. I was 12 when this was going on, you know? I didn't go to Lake Geneva in the 1990s. I didn't work there.

Apparently, Lorraine Williams is really tall, which I had no idea about. And it was Lisa Stevens of Paizo, who one day is talking. And she's like, “Oh, Lorraine Williams is really tall.”

“She’s really tall?”

“Yeah, she's really tall and I'm really tall.”

I’m like, “You're really tall?” I had no idea.

And so, you know, it's little things like that that I always worried about. But either they're all very nice, or it seems like I did a good job capturing what they wanted to be told about their time working there.

SR: Yeah, that's great. That's got to be what you want to hear. I'm sure that telling a story of that type, about people who are still alive and still out there making games, many of them. You want to get it right. To get that feedback's probably very validating.

BR: Oh yeah.

SR: Are there any other projects that you're working on besides maybe this hypothetical future second round of history-of-D&D book? Any other projects or books that you're working on that you want to talk about?

BR: I'm working on a young adult horror novel, but nothing to say there right now, so I will just say if you have not purchased Slaying the Dragon, please go purchase it or take it out from the library or borrow it from a friend.

Just don't illegally download it online.

Because, as Shannon said it is an amazing piece of work after five years.

SR: Yeah, yeah.

BR: So, if you thought this was interesting, go read the book!

SR: Where can folks find your work? Obviously, they can find your book at any bookstore, but your other work?

BR: I highly recommend right now friending me on Facebook. I'm Ben Riggs on Facebook.

There's a gay choir master in Colorado who's Ben Riggs and I’m not him. There’s an Australian wine maker, Ben Riggs, and I'm not him.

Find the role-playing-game Ben Riggs on Facebook and I highly recommend friending me because gosh, the people and things that pop into the comments on my posts… I'm not bragging about my posts, but just the people who comment and the things they say boggle my mind to this day. In an Internet full of darkness and dirty alleys it really stands out.

I say sometimes it's the best thing on the Internet, and I don't even know if I'm joking.

SR: Yeah. Most people that are into tabletop role-playing games generally are most of the time pretty good people, pretty interesting people that are pretty passionate about the hobby.

Sometimes you get some bad apples and people with crazy hot takes that should just go back to the holes that they came out of, but for the most part most people in the in the community are pretty positive and pretty welcoming so that doesn't surprise me too much.

Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. It has been a real pleasure to get to chat with you.

BR: Thank you. I'm sure you have better weather than I do, so enjoy it!

 

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This concludes the interview with Ben Riggs. Stay tuned to the GM Cellar YouTube channel for clips from the interview and our reactions.

What do you think? Is the Golden Age of TTRPGs at an end? Share your thoughts in the comments below. (Criticism and disagreement are welcome, personal attacks are not.)

 

If you enjoyed this blog, please like and share it on social media. If you want more content on game mastering, follow me at www.shannonrampe.com/signup and the GM Cellar YouTube channel.

#ttrpg #d&d #dnd #wizardofthecoast #ttrpgindustry #interview #benriggs

Ben Riggs is a tabletop RPG historian and author of the excellent and well-researched book, Slaying the Dragon: a Secret History of Dungeons and Dragons published by Macmillan in 2022. On January 3rd, Riggs shared a lengthy post on Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit that was later shared on ENWorld in which he claimed that the Golden Age of tabletop role-playing games was at an end.

The post went viral and spawned a bevy of responses from community members and content creators. Riggs himself talked further about the post in the latest episode of his podcast, Plot Points.

On January 23rd, I had the opportunity to speak with Ben about his book, and about his predictions about the future of the TTRPG hobby. It was an enlightening and wide-ranging discussion, and I am pleased to be able to share the interview with you!

Note: the interview has been edited for clarity. Due to the length of the interview, the blog will be separated into two parts, with the second installment to be published next week

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Shannon Rampe: Ben, thank you so much for hopping on here with me today to talk about your book and to talk about the explosion that happened on the Internet after you posted a Facebook post on January 3rd in which you claimed that the Golden Age of tabletop role-playing games is dead.

Ben Riggs: Was it an explosion?

Shannon Rampe: It may have been a bit of an explosion.

BR: It's very odd to me because I posted it on Reddit, Facebook and Twitter and within minutes on Reddit…I had my Reddit account set up so I got an email every time someone commented. And it's just like BRRRRRRRR! I'm like, OK, something is going on here, but is it just because I have those email notifications coming in? Is this really that unusual?

But then it got to 600,000 views on Twitter and EN World reposted it and it was like, “here's what everyone else important in the industry has to say about what this guy said.”

And it's like, OK, I guess this is this has become a thing. And then I hid under a bushel in my attic for about 2 weeks. I actually looked at very little of what other people have had to say about it because it got rough fast.

SR: Yeah, people got really passionate.

BR: I should say very quickly, I have no problem with anyone disagreeing with me. The world would be a grey and boring place if everyone was like “Riggs is right about everything all the time!”

But there were some rough things said by some people.

SR: I'm sure. And that's unfortunate.

I read a lot of the stuff in some of those threads and it was surprising because it was clear that some people just really didn't know anything about you or about your work. If they had bothered to take 5 minutes to look, maybe they would have commented differently. But, whatever, that's what you're going to get on the Internet.

BR: It's the Internet. I will say, one interesting statistic is 600,000 people saw the first post on Twitter. I think 15,000 saw the last. Which still may make it the most-read thing I ever wrote. But clearly a lot of people got halfway through and were like “bing, off we go.”

SR: The thrust of your argument seems to be that in early 2023, Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast attempted to kill the OGL, and major content creators—MCDM, Kobold Press, Critical Role—all decided, “We can't take this risk. We're going to go create our own games.” And that decision, along with WOTC’s decision to publish an updated version of the ruleset for 2024, is going to result in a fracturing of the audience and that the industry will shrink as a result.

Have I summed that up correctly?

BR: I would also throw in that the media that was bringing people back to D&D may be moving away from focusing on D&D.

SR: Right, Critical Role and other producers. As well as Stranger Things.

BR: Well, it's not what you don't know. It's what you think you know that ain't so that's always gonna get you.

And somewhere along the way I picked up that Critical Role is making Candela Obscura and Daggerheart and they're going to move away from D&D. And, of course, I was totally wrong about the leaving D&D aspect of things, at least so far.

Even with that aside, even with Critical Role continuing to play D&D… I'm not a big Critical Role person. But Matt Colville, him I'm a huge fan of. Him I watch a lot of.

SR: Yeah, love his channel. I think Running the Game is some of the best DMing content out there.

BR: Without a doubt. But his channel has changed a lot in the past year or two. It used to be video after video after video driving people to D&D. Now it’s…

You still get some D&D content out there, but there's a lot of stuff about his new role-playing game. Gosh, did he interview a linguist this year for an episode?

So, there was previously this really beneficial cycle where you had media driving people to Dungeons & Dragons. When they got to Dungeons & Dragons, they found arguably the best version of the game since 1980 to play.

And as they played more and more D&D, they might branch out into third-party publishers making content for 5th Edition and from there they might still further go on to the OSR community, to indie tabletop role-playing games.

And that cycle has fundamentally altered in the past 12 months where… Just the fact that media is not so solely focused on D&D will slow down bringing people into the game.

Even if the revised D&D that they put out in 2024, even if that is just as good as 5th Edition or better, I still think it's going to cause a fracture in the community because some people will inevitably stick with what they have now.

And all the third-party publishers moving away from 5th [Edition]? I think that is a fracture in the community.

Previously, they could all share the same community of players. That will no longer be able to… It'll be impossible. You can't do it anymore. And people don't fundamentally enjoy learning new systems. It is one of the reasons that it's hard for people to move beyond D&D, and it's hard for people to move into other games or indie games because they just don't like doing it.

So, I think that while individually, all these companies made very logical decisions. They're like, “I can't let Hasbro control my company. I need to go create my own game.” They go create their own game.

Because I know MCDM the best, I use them the most. Colville has, I think, 450,000 subscribers on YouTube. He was able to convert that to about 30,000 buyers of the MCDM RPG.

And man, it's just hard to imagine future MCDM RPG Kickstarters majorly topping that. To put it in perspective, I went and looked at Colville’s Kickstarter profits, and essentially the trend line was up for years, peaking with this one.

But I think that's your peak.

I don't think you're going to be as successful converting people to MCDM RPG players as you were by saying, “this is something to help you play D&D 5E, which you are already playing, and you love my D&D 5E advice, so buy my book.”

But now this is to his old audience, “You liked my D&D 5E advice, try something new.” And to people that don't know him, it's, “Hey, I have a game that's not D&D to sell you and I need to explain it to you, and you always hit.” It's just harder. But am I rambling on now?

SR: No, it's interesting stuff. But I want to throw out a counterpoint there. What about the extraordinary success of Baldur's Gate 3 as a media property and potential entry point into D&D and role-playing games?

BR: It would be great, but I just don't know a ton of people who go from video games to role-playing games. I know a lot of role-players who play video games, but there just doesn't seem to be as firm of a path. Now I have no data to back that up.

SR: I think the thing that we can observe is that it's another missed opportunity for Wizards of the Coast. Aside from some social media posts and some downloadable character sheets, they didn't really do a lot in parallel with the release of Baldur's Gate 3. They could have released a campaign set or a book or something to capitalize on that game coming out. And they just didn't.

BR: I'm sorely tempted to plunge into the depths of the amazing product we have not seen in the past two years that should exist. Okay, I’m briefly going to do it.

No D&D Honor Among Thieves Starter Set? They have not announced a Starter Set for the upcoming Revised Edition. They've announced that there'll be a Player's Handbook in 2024. I want to say they've gone back and forth on whether the Monster Manual or DMG will be available in 2024?

But no Starter Set for the new thing? With 5th Edition, the Starter Set came out first as I recall. Great idea!

Oh yeah, Baldur's Gate 3. I would love it if D&D made Wizards more money by giving us more amazing stuff. I am very happy with the royalties that Wizards is bringing in through Baldur's Gate 3 because it makes them think, “Hey, D&D is a brand worth investing in.”

But I just don't know that the video games are the thing that's going to make people want to go and buy a D&D TTRPG book. I just don't know.

To give a quick historical example, the 4th Edition team was specifically told, “go and make a game influenced by World of Warcraft. Make a game that would be really easy for World of Warcraft players to go and pick up.” And they did. And it is the worst-selling edition of DND.

It's the only edition I have no numbers for. But every creator told me that that it sold worse than 3.5. And 3.5 sold worse than 3.0. And 3.0 sold worse than Second [Edition]. Second [Edition] sold worse than First [Edition] and there we are. The only edition to sell better than the one that came before it is 5th Edition.

You got me going, so, okay, I said the things I wanted to say. I'm trying to be disciplined here.

SR: So, assuming that you're right, assuming that we're talking about the end of an era, do you think it's an actual decline in the number of players that we're looking at over the next 5 to 10 years? Or is it just some leveling off of the massive and explosive growth that we've seen?

BR: The words I used were stagnation and decline because I think that the growth of D&D was fueled by the entry of new players. New players have to go and buy the stuff for the first time, but once they have the stuff, they don't really need it again for a long time, if ever.

And if the things that were bringing people to D&D are no longer bringing new people into D&D, sales will stagnate and decline.

SR: Right. Because most of the audience, being players, don't go out and buy every new book that comes out. DM's will. But players, they're going to buy a Player's Handbook and maybe one or two accessory books here and there. And that's largely it.

BR: Yeah. It's harder for me to talk about the statistics of people playing. I would imagine you'd have to look at D&D Beyond or Roll20 for stuff like that.

I really dwell on sales figures. They're more measurable and they tell you about the people making money.

A thing I heard a lot of was, “Whatever happens with D&D doesn't matter to me, indie game designer, indie game player.” I am like, “No, it does. It really, really does.”

You will notice that indie Kickstarters, they've been doing better in the past ten years. Avatar, the Last Airbender made all this money. The reason that even indie games are making more money is because you don't need to explain to D&D players what a tabletop roleplaying game is. They're there already. They're ready to be your audience.

Furthermore, according to the 1999 Wizards of the Coast Marketing Survey of D&D Players which they released a portion of publicly, the average person who currently plays D&D, owns 2.2 role-playing games. If there are millions and millions of new D&D players, and every one of them buys D&D and just one other role-playing game, that is enough to fuel huge growth in the rest of the industry.

SR: That actually leads into a follow up question that I had. Your argument that if the audience shrinks, obviously there's less money for creators publishing games, but that doesn't necessarily mean that there are less-creative games are going to be made. They might just be lower quality or not distributed as widely.

The Forge from the early 2000s, which spawned the story games movement, which ultimately led to things like Apocalypse World and some of the stuff that's happening now on Itch.io and the proliferation of tiny experimental indie games… Don't you think that kind of stuff will still happen? That we'll still get continue to get creative games that could then blossom into larger movements like Apocalypse World or Forged in the Dark or things like that?

BR: Let's just stick with the Apocalypse World for a second here. Let's imagine a world where the last 10 years of explosive growth didn't happen. There's got to be hundreds of Apocalypse World games—PBTA games—now, right? I want to say Vincent Baker has a list, right? And the Forged in the Dark games, I want to say John Harper said he considers them a grouping of PBTA games.

If you did not have these hordes of people start playing D&D, what would the audience have been for Apocalypse World?

Now, it's a brilliant game and it's genius. One of the most depressing facts about TTRPG history is the quality of the product is not nearly as important as other factors in determining how much money it's going to make and how much it's going to sell.

The huge influx of people into D&D was a massive boon to the Apocalypse World indie movement. If we remove that, maybe it's just Apocalypse World and then it's a bunch of people like goofing around with it and making their own games. And maybe it's zines getting passed around, but money buys people's time. If you don't have the prospect of like making some money on Urban Shadows or Cartel or something like that, maybe you just don't do it. Maybe it's a thing you do for you and your friends. That is where I see the problem here.

To put it in another way, what's the best poem that you read that was published this year?

SR: Uhh… haha…

BR: Yeah, I know, right? I couldn't name one either. There may be amazing poetry being written, but because there is no audience for it, kind of nobody cares.

In 2008, that's what I thought the future of the role-playing game industry was. I was like, “Okay, I've purchased all the White Wolf books and all the Cthulhu books I will ever want. Since the role-playing game industry is over now, I will happily just be playing these games with my friends until I die and that's fine. I don't care.”

I did not see, of course, what the next 16 years would bring us.

When Van Gogh was younger, he wrote his brother being like, “I just want to paint stuff that's going to sell. I just want to make some money painting.” It would be interesting to see what would have happened if Van Gogh made more money during his life.

Somebody on Reddit… it was one of the first posts where I was like things have gone south, somebody was like, “How can this guy possibly say that less money in an industry will decrease its creativity?”

And I'm like “Oh my gosh, sweet summer child. Are you under 25? Have you ever had a job?”

Obviously in indie RPGs, they're not necessarily bringing in millions of dollars all the time, but if you can put out a game and make ten grand… I've talked to indie game companies where they're like, “Yeah, we net $100,000 a year.”

And if you can net $100,000 a year selling your indie game, that's incredible.

But again, that audience is coming from D&D, and that's coming from the Golden Age of role-playing. And if D&D has a problem, if there's a kink in the pipeline, it's going to eventually trickle down to those indie RPGs.

Was that too long of an answer?

SR: That's a great answer. I think it's an interesting response.

So I have a sort of crackpot hypothesis, which is Hasbro bought Wizards of the Coast because of Magic: the Gathering, not because of D&D. D&D is never going to make the kind of money that Hasbro wants and their attempts to monetize it using things like the Honor Among Thieves movie, or the proliferation of video games that they've licensed off, with the exception of a few things like Baldur's Gate 3, has not really succeeded for them in turning D&D into a $500 million a year brand.

Do you think that there's a possible future where either Hasbro sells D&D off because it's just not worth it to them, or where maybe D&D becomes such an insignificant brand in terms of the revenue that they bring in that the D&D creative team gets basically ignored and can kind of do whatever they want?

BR: My understanding is that latter scenario is how we got 5th Edition. My understanding is that Third [Edition] does better than D&D was doing in the late 90s but it doesn't sell like Second [Edition]. 3.5 doesn't sell like Third [Edition].

And Fourth [Edition] was the “We’re going to bring new people” edition, and it did worse than 3.5. So, Fourth [Fifth – sic] was just going be this “keeping the lights on caretaker edition.” You can really see it in the beginning of the publication history when the three core books came out and then it was a campaign every 6 to 8 months for a couple of years. You got one setting book, I think it was the Sword Coast Adventurers Guide, and that was kind of it until things really started to light on fire.

To be more specific, I don't think Hasbro would ever sell D&D, because it doesn't seem like that's what Hasbro does. From everything I can tell, they are a vampire that once you are in their crypt, they will not release you. You are trapped there forever and D&D is in Hasbro’s crypt being drained of blood.

D&D is in Hasbro’s crypt being drained of blood.

But if things get really bad, I could see them being like, “We're going to mothball that for a while.” There's certainly brands that it's like, “Well, we're not going to bother supporting it right now. Maybe we'll come around again.”

And thank god for the OGL in that regard, and thank god they put 5th Edition into the Creative Commons because the game itself is free now, even if they were to do that.

I would tell you the following things. I am increasingly convinced that the following things are required for D&D to grow:

D&D needs to be bringing in new players.

D&D needs to be making it easier to be a Dungeon Master.

And you're better off thinking of Dungeons & Dragons as a sport than anything else.

They seem to want to think it's a video game. TSR’s model really was, “We sell books. We're a publisher. That's what we sell.”

In fact, what Wizards of the Coast sells when they sell D&D is they sell you sitting around a table having an amazing time with your friends. That is in fact their actual product.

Another thing I was wrong about with Critical Role was, for years, I thought that Critical Role’s primary advantage to D&D was that it was didactic, that it was teaching people how to play the game, so they're like, “Okay, now I can go play the game.”

I was totally wrong and misapprehending the appeal of Critical Role. Critical Role is showing you what you get when you buy D&D. You are getting an amazing time with your friends. And what has Hasbro, Wizards needs to do is create a WWE for D&D. Or an NBA for D&D, but I think the WWE is actually a better model.

You create some entertainment product that is so new, so hot, so engaging, that you get eyeballs. Those eyeballs bring you new players, and they find a version of D&D that is so easy to run that vast numbers of them become Dungeon Masters. They then go and find you even more players.

Critical Role is showing you what you get when you buy D&D. You are getting an amazing time with your friends. And what...Wizards needs to do is create a WWE for D&D.

That is my theory of the case. Hasbro took steps in that direction. They paid a billion dollars for an entertainment company called E1, and then they sold it this year for a $500 million loss.

SR: Ouch. I heard you talking about that on your Plot Points episode on this recently. They did put out a couple of shows recently and I haven't watched them, so I don't know too much about them as actual plays.

BR: Let me briefly tell you about one.

Encounter Party is kind of like Critical Role, but I would say they try and keep the table talk in-character, more than Critical Role does. They have 22 episodes. They are essentially available for free online, and Hasbro has done literally no marketing of them.

I spoke on this past Thursday to the D&D brand manager and head of licensing and marketing, who was “early retired” in December. Her name is Liz Schuh. One of the things she told me was around 4th Edition, their marketing budget got so small that they could no longer market individual products, they could only market the brand.

So, you wouldn't really see ads for individual releases, they would just do what they could to support the D&D brand. That started with 4th Edition and has not substantially changed through 5th Edition despite the success of 5th Edition, therefore, when they spend god knows how many millions of dollars producing their version of Critical Role, where they're flying people out to Los Angeles to record in sound stages, they spend no money marketing it and no money advertising it, and no one knows it's there.

I know for a fact that they have spent no money essentially promoting that product and the people involved in that product certainly noticed that no money was spent marketing their product.

And that, I think, is a pillar of the future of D&D. Something like that. Maybe this thing doesn't quite take off. But if you like at Critical Role—I pulled up Critical Role’s viewing stats in anticipation for this conversation—if you look at Critical Role, it took Critical Role years to really take off! They started recording in 2012 and it wasn't really till 2018 that I that I think it took off.

And what do you mean by took off… you can argue about all day long, but they did it for years before it really became what we think of today as Critical Role.

The idea that they invested all this money in producing a show that is hopefully going to attract people to their product by saying, “Look, this is what it is! It's having this amazing time with your friends!” And then they don't promote it.

I will also just say... you know, they fired all those people. This is so terrible. Poor, poor, all of them, the people they let go, I can’t believe it. But a voice in the back of my head was like, “you're going to get to talk to these people finally.”

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This concludes the first half of the interview. Be sure to check back next week to read the second half. Portions of the interview will also be available on YouTube.

What do you think? Is the Golden Age of TTRPGs at an end? Share your thoughts in the comments below. (Criticism and disagreement are welcome, personal attacks are not.)

If you enjoyed this blog, please like and share it on social media. If you want more content on game mastering, follow me at www.shannonrampe.com/signup and the GM Cellar YouTube channel.

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Planescape, the latest campaign setting published for Dungeons & Dragons, is the strangest, most boundary-stretching campaign setting ever produced for D&D. Maybe you are interested in running a campaign in the setting, maybe you just want to blend Planescape into your current setting, or maybe you just want to know a little bit about what this new setting is all about. if so, this blog is for you.

What in the Nine Hells is Planescape?

(Hint: you can visit the Nine Hells in Planescape)

Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse is a reboot of the 1990's Planescape setting setting originally published by TSR for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) second edition. The weirdpunk fantasy setting was created as an attempt to codify D&D's bizarre, fantastic cosmology from its various settings stretching back to first edition AD&D's excellent Manual of the Planes. Written by David "Zeb" Cook and heavily influenced by the raw, frenetic sketches and paintings of Tony DiTerlizzi, Planescape became a cult phenomenon. Forget about fighting dragons for piles of treasure, crawling through underground catacombs, or stealing jewels from the king (all adventures you might experience in a traditional AD&D adventure), in Planescape, characters grapple with gods, demons, and philosophical extremists in a setting where belief has the power to literally shape reality. It was, in many ways, D&D's most experimental setting, delving into philosophical concepts that were being explored in games at the time like Ars Magica or Nobilis while still standing firmly in D&D's roots of hit dice and THAC0s.

The 2023 re-release of Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse brings the Planescape setting up to date with the 5th edition rules and expands setting of the Outer Planes presented in the Dungeon Master's Guide (DMG). The 3-book slipcase includes a campaign setting book covering the city of Sigil and the Outlands, a monster book, a two-sided map, a DM screen, and a full-length campaign called Turn of Fortune's Wheel that takes players from Level 3 to Level 17. (The purpose of this blog isn't a full review of these books, but I will touch more on why I think it's worth considering if you want to run Planescape in 2024 and beyond.)

The Outer Planes are philosophically aligned infinite realms where the gods live. Evil gods live in the evil planes (the aforementioned Nine Hells), good gods live in good planes, lawful in lawful, and chaotic in chaos planes. There are sixteen such Outer Planes based on that planes' philosophical alignment to the intersecting law/chaos/good/evil alignment axis from D&D. But the important part is at the intersection of those planes sits the purely neutral plane known as the Outlands. And in the center of the Outlands rises an impossibly tall spire. At the top of that spire sits a torus, and on the inside of that torus is a city: Sigil, the City of Doors. Sigil is a meeting ground for creatures from every plane and every world; portals located throughout the city allow you to travel to anywhere in the multiverse if you have the right key. The city is overseen by the enigmatic and godlike Lady of Pain, but it is the philosophical factions that vie for control of the city.

D&D Planescape campaigns may involve politics and faction war in Sigil, planehopping to truly wild places (like the City of Brass in the Elemental Plane of Fire), confronting the very gods in the Outer Planes, or going on quests for the strange beings that dwell in the Outlands where a philosophically-aligned gate-town connects to each Outer Plane. Or they may involve planar beings visiting the Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, or some other "Prime Material Plane" campaign setting.

Planescape is the "Everything, Everywhere, All at Once" of D&D, and as such, anything is possible. That makes it one of those most exciting campaign settings, but it can also make it one of the most daunting for a DM who wants to run it.

Planescape Campaign Theme and Touchstones

When planning a D&D campaign, one of the things that make it successful is to establish for yourself and for the players what type of game you're running. Is it going to be filled with political intrigue and personal betrayals, like Game of Thrones? Is it going to be a gritty, low-magic campaign in the guts of a city like the Gentlemen Bastards books? Or maybe it's an epic quest to save the world from the forces of darkness, like Lord of the Rings? In each of these cases, we can point towards clear, recognizable cultural touchstones that will resonate with you and your players. This helps the players build characters that fit in the campaign you want to run and helps to limit the scope and tone of the campaign.

Themes

You can run so many different types of campaigns in Planescape that it can get a bit overwhelming.

One approach is to take an existing theme you're familiar with, like the "jobs for a patron" format and simply port the model into the weird setting of Planescape. Examples might include:

Jobs for a patron: Set in Sigil, the characters are agents for one of the Factions and take up missions against the other Factions or go on quests to the outer planes Take out a cult: More than one Planescape campaign is centered around taking down an evil cult bent on returning a god from the dead. Search for a legendary artifact: This has an opportunity to take the character from the sprawling libraries of Sigil to the deepest and deadliest layers of the Outer Planes where the party can face strange and terrifying foes.

A second approach is to incorporate Planescape into your existing campaign. Sending the characters on a side quest to Sigil or another planar location is an easy way to bring the strange into the familiar without starting an entirely new campaign.

A third approach is to invoke something that feels very different from classic D&D tropes. This can be the most challenging since you're trying different themes in a different setting. But if any setting will reward it, it will be Planescape. This is your opportunity to lean hard into the weird and philosophical. What happens if the campaign is about fighting beliefs instead of fighting monsters? How can memory be a powerful weapon? Does causality work the same way on all planes? Maybe not. What happens when you introduce time travel? What does death mean when dead people simply re-appear on an outer plane? What happens with alignments when pushed to extremes?

Touchstones

Having touchstones you can reference and that you can point your players towards will make it easier to wrap your head around what Planescape is supposed to feel like. But because Planescape is so "out there," we have to stretch a little more to find relevant cultural touchstones. Here are a few that I find interesting:

Planescape: Torment - The 1999 CRPG is the best media touchstone for obvious reasons. It's also an excellent game and a classic for a reason. Well worth the time if you can adjust to the dated gameplay of a game released 25 years ago. If you don't want to play through it, consider watching a streamed playthrough on YouTube or, better yet, listed to the fully-voiced retelling in the Planescape: Torment Unofficial Audio Series.

Torment: Tides of Numenara - A more recent CRPG that is inspired by Planescape Torment but is set in the Numenera "Ninth World" setting. This is a very different setting than Planescape - it's a science fantasy dying earth setting based on Monte Cook's Numenara ttrpg setting (note that Monte Cook was the author of many of the original 2nd edition Planescape source books).

The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny - The Nebula and Hugo Award-winning sci-fi and fantasy master, Roger Zelazny's 10-volume Chronicles of Amber series is all about world-hopping adventures in a philosophical multiverse where all realities are shadows of Amber and the the shifting allegiances of the protagonist and his family bring ruin and rebirth to Amber and many of the other worlds. The strange metaphysics and world-hopping of these short adventurous novels feels very in the realm of Planescape.

Marvel's "Cosmic" Storylines in the 1970s and 1980s - Technically starting as early as 1966, Marvel comics began experimenting with stories that stretched beyond Earth, with villains such as Galactus and Thanos that could threaten reality itself. Many of these characters were created and written about by the legendary Jim Starlin, who would go on to write the Infinity Gauntlet and Infinity War series. The films were enjoyable, of course, but to see how weird these stories got, go back and read Jim Starlin's run of Warlock or the original Infinity Gauntlet series. The cosmic, reality-bending events of these stories always had a Planescape sort of feel to me.

Saga by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples - More world-hopping weirdness, Saga feels like an alternate-reality Planescape, one filled with beautifully-written family drama on multiple worlds. Definitely worth the read and will give you inspiration for your Planescape setting.

Elric Saga by Michael Moorcock - Moorcock's Elric novels were one of the original influences on D&D, but they stretched into strange realms of demigods and demons. Their more combat-heavy, adventure-story nature makes them a good source of inspiration for Planescape games.

Without going into detail on all of them, other great influences include:

Exalted (TTRPG) published by White Wolf Nobilis (TTRPG) by Jenna K. Moran Everything Everywhere All at Once (film) Heavy Metal (film, 1981) Stargate (film) The Sandman by Neil Gaiman (graphic novels) The Great and Secret Show by Clive Barker (novel) Perdido Street Station by China Mieville (novel) If On a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (novel)

There are many more, but hopefully you've found something here you're familiar with that can give you and your players a cultural touchstone or two.

Reviewing Source Material

There is a lot of source material out there on Planescape once you start looking around. Here are my recommendations on what to pick up and read:

The 5th Edition Campaign Setting, Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse makes for a solid entry point into the campaign setting. While you will find far more detail in the 2nd Edition resources, the new campaign set presents a decent overview of the main themes and locations of the setting and gives you plenty of adventure hooks to get started. The artwork is also beautiful and evocative. Some themes and details have been adjusted since the 2nd Edition release, but for the most part, this set is narratively compatible with the setting, factions, and characters presented in 2nd Edition. The setting guide, Sigil and the Outlands, is the star in this set. At 96 pages, it provides enough detail to give an overview of the key locations, leaving out the other Outer Planes (which are described in the DMG). I would have liked this book to contain even more detail, but this does give a nice overview at 96 pages is easier to digest than trying to read hundreds of pages. For me, one miss in this book was the choice to leave out "the cant," a planar slang that appeared throughout the 2nd Edition materials and which for me lent a lot of flavor to Sigil. The second book, Morte's Planar Parade, is a 64 page volume offering new planar monsters as well as faction agents. I quite like the additional options presented in here, but for me this is in many ways just another monster book. The third volume is a campaign-length adventure, called Turn of Fortune's Wheel. There are some excellent adventures in the campaign, some compelling and unique hooks, and the adventure does take the characters all through Sigil and the Outlands, making it a solid introduction to the setting. However, for me, the overarching plot didn't feel compelling or coherent enough. For my current campaign, I have elected to lift many of the NPCs and locations from the campaign book while wrapping it in a story I developed for the PCs in my campaign.

The 5th Edition Dungeon Master's Guide is a key resource, simply for its descriptions of the Inner and Outer Planes. While it mentions these only briefly, it will at least help you grasp an overview. However, if you plan to send the PCs on adventures into the Outer Planes beyond the Outlands (using one of Sigil's many portals or by passing through an Outlands Gate Town), you're going to want further detail. For that, I'll recommend the other resources below.

The Planescape Campaign Setting for 2nd Edition is the next logical place to start. If you can find a physical copy at a used book store, it's definitely worth having, particularly for the four poster-sized maps featuring various elements of the planes and also the evocative DM screen featuring the Lady of Pain. Throughout these materials, the setting-defining artwork by Tony DiTerlizzi sets it apart from other D&D settings from the period. The Campaign Setting includes separate player's and DM's books (32 and 64 pages), a book on Sigil and the Outlands (96 pages), and a 32 page monster book. Thanks to the overall larger page count and smaller print, the original campaign setting packs about twice the amount of information as the newer 5e setting. It does not, however, contain any published adventures. And it comes with some of the baggage from legacy D&D, such as the notion that the DM's book shouldn't be seen by players and that the DM should keep certain things a big secret.

Of note, in 2nd Edition, TSR attempted to scrub "demons" and "devils" from the game, likely in a response to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. These beings are restored in 5th Edition but the 2nd Edition materials change some of these creatures names and the names of their planes of origin.

Other 2nd Edition resources worth considering:

Planes of Law, Planes of Chaos, Planes of Conflict: TSR released three separate box sets covering the 16 Outer Planes. Planes of Law covers Acheron, Arcadia, Baator (the Nine Hells in 5th Edition), Mechanus, and Mount Celestia. Planes of Chaos covers The Abyss, Pandemonium, Limbo, Arboria, and Ysgard. And Planes of Conflict covers the Beastlands, Bytopia, Carceri, Elysium, Gehenna, and the Gray Wastes (Hades in 5th Edition). If you want to expand your campaign to include adventures on the Outer Planes themselves, you will likely want to pick these up. They are available as reasonably-priced PDFs on the Dungeon Masters Guild . If you want a very Sigil-focused campaign, there are several books that significantly expand this location: In the Cage: a Guide to Sigil is an deeper dive into locations in the city. Uncaged: Faces of Sigil provides 40 pre-written, detailed NPCs for use in Sigil-based games. And The Factol's Manifesto provides a deep-dive on Sigil's philosophical factions. Some of these factions have changed in the 5e setting materials, so this last one may be of limited utility. Of these, I quite liked Uncaged: Faces of Sigil for some good drag-and-drop NPCs. There were a variety of interesting adventures published for Planescape. Dead Gods is a truly epic campaign, featuring, of course, dead gods. The Great Modron March is an interesting one, serving as a prequel to the events of Dead Gods and also presaging some of the events in Turn of Fortune's Wheel. There are also several volumes of one-shot adventures. I quite like T ales from the Infinite Staircase which showcases a lot of the weirdness of the setting. Other fans will have their own preferred campaigns and adventures published from this era.

Several indie designers have also recently released some excellent materials on the Dungeon Master's Guild. The Manual of the Planes from QL Games is one I'm fond of. It attempts to recreate the 1st Edition Manual of the Planes, updating it for 5th Edition. It provides a more detailed dive into each of the Inner and Outer Planes (moreso than the Dungeon Master's Guide, but not as detailed as the Planes of Law/Chaos/Conflict box sets), as well as a lot of new player options and monsters. Encounters Enhanced: Sigil by Greg Wright provides a selection of really excellent Sigil-specific encounters broken down by each ward in the city. There are more volumes that I haven't yet had a chance to pick up, but I'm planning to look into The Planescape Archive and Factions of Sigil.

There are also plenty of great resources on the web for researching specific factions, NPCs, or locations. I Am the Mimir (mimir.net) is full of great artwork and is presented from the point of view of one of the eponymous planar google artifacts. The Mirrored Library of Timaresh (rilmani.org) has some very detailed information on some of the factions as well as a lot of planar history. The Forgotten Realms Wiki (forgottenrealms.fandom.com) is an encyclopedia for Planescape, which is surprising given it is largely FR-focused. Finally, for advice on running games set in Planescape, check out The Planar DM (theplanardm.com), a site more focused on how to run the setting than on particular lore. It was that site, along with recent reddit posts on /r/planescapesetting that inspired this blog.

Hopefully this post helped you get an idea of what Planescape is all about and gives you some starting points on how to run it and where to learn more.

What do you think? Have you run Planescape in the past? What advice would you share with Planar DMs? Any favorite resources I missed that you think are critical? Let us know in the comments below.

If you enjoyed this blog, please like and share it on social media. If you want more content on game mastering, follow me at www.shannonrampe.com/signup and the GM Cellar YouTube channel.

#ttrpg #d&d #dnd #gmtips #gmadvice #dungeonmaster #gamemaster #dmtips #dmadvice #planescape

The extremely creative and talented folks over at GM Cellar launched their highly entertaining and useful actual-play show on YouTube this week, Dragons from Scratch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Wdx-MlvgdQ

An "actual-play" show, for those outside the TTRPG space, is a show in which you get to actually watch people play a tabletop role-playing game, learning about the game, seeing the story develop, and coming to know the players as well as their characters. The hook for Dragons from Scratch is that the game master, Christopher Campbell, has done zero prep work. Nada, zip, zilch. He is improvising the entire session on the fly. It's amusing and insightful, and the producers have helpfully included cute popups that explain techniques Christopher is using to keep the game flowing from beat to beat.

I loved the first episode and I am looking forward to seeing where and how the show develops, as well as to seeing what other exciting developments the creative team at GM Cellar comes up with.

Since I was feeling inspired by GM Cellar's video this week, I thought I'd share with you three of my own tips for improvising at the table. While I am a GM that believes in at least some preparation, being able to improvise when the players veer off course is an absolutely essential skill for GMs to have.

Tip 1: Keep a list of NPC names handy. Spice up your list by including heritage and a personality trait.

When the player characters tell you they want to ask a guard directions to the dungeon, you can keep it super high-level, but moments like this offer fun opportunities for improvisational role-play. But chances are you haven't prepared details about every generic NPC in the entire world! Having a short list of names behind the screen makes it easier to quickly bring a character to life. This is a super-common recommendation, but I also like to include species/heritage and one or two personality traits, allowing you to produce memorable characters on the fly.

After all, Skarr Feldspar, the gnome with a chip on his shoulder is infinitely more memorable than just "the guard." In addition to an opportunity for role-playing, details like this help your world to feel real and have depth. It's the iceberg theory of worldbuilding but at a micro scale. Don't feel like you need to go overboard though; trying to flesh out every possible character the PCs might encounter can slow the game to a crawl. But inserting memorable characters here and there certainly livens things up!

Tip 2: When the players want to do something totally unexpected and unplanned for, take five.

No matter how much preparation you do, your players will always come up with something unexpected. Sometimes this takes things totally off course and in a different direction than you know what to do with. This is a great time to take a five-minute break. Use that time to jot down some ideas - NPCs, locations, possible threats or complications the party might encounter. Don't worry about whether the ideas are terrible or great, just write them down with them and see what you find. Often this few minutes is enough to spark your imagination. Then, when you pick the session back up, pivot to your idea list to help you adapt on the fly.

Tip 3: Follow the players' lead.

One of the ideas I love in Justin Alexander's new book, So You Want to Be a Gamemaster is the notion that the fundamental responsibility of the GM is making a ruling. Give the PCs a few details and they will tell you what they want to do. You make a ruling as to whether they achieve their desired outcome or not (using the rules and/or dice rolls), and then describe how the situation has changed. The PCs react to the new situation, and you make another ruling.

This circular call and response is the core cycle of a roleplaying game. If you are improvising, you don't have to know what the big plot is or have every encounter planned out. If you have a starting point and a hook for the PCs, they'll start acting, and then all you have to do is make a ruling and describe the outcome. Of course, being familiar with the rules for whatever game you're playing is essential, but if you can make a ruling and describe the outcome, you can improvise at the table.

That's it for this week's blog. Three tips that will hopefully help you to be more comfortable and have more fun when improvising.

Be sure to check out GM Cellar and Dragons From Scratch! Give them a like and subscribe to their channel if you enjoy it. And while you're liking and subscribing and sharing all the love, go ahead and subscribe to my newsletter for more content like this and share this blog post on social media.

Thanks for reading!

#gmtips #gmadvice #ttrpg #dnd #roleplaying #dungeonsanddragons #dmadvice

Friends, it's that goodly time of year again... no, not the time where we drink all the bubbly things... okay, well, yes, it is that too. BUT, I was referring to that most wonderful time of the spreadsheet year! That magical time where I analyse and categorize all the lists I made and data I tracked about my entertainments throughout 2023. It's the most trivial and silly of activities and I enjoy it immensely.

Games in Review

We'll kick this one off with video games. Long-time readers of my blog and newsletter know that for the past four years, I've used an Excel spreadsheet to log my time played on each video game I play and then analyze the data at the end of the year. What was fun this year was to see so many other companies getting in on the act. Now instead of ruthlessly selling off your personal data to the highest third-party bidder, Steam, Sony, Microsoft, and others will take that data and regurgitate it back at you in a delightful, colorful infographic.

Steam's in particular is catchy and packed with interesting data. You can view your own here: https://store.steampowered.com/yearinreview?snr=1_2108_9__2107

But simply sharing Steam's infographic with you would do a disservice to the mountain of data I logged in my spreadsheet, and would fail to include games from platforms other than Steam PC games. So I hastily modified Steam's graphic to incorporate some additional highlights. Here it is!

Baldur's Gate 3, as I've discussed previously, is without a doubt my game of the year. But I want to give a shout-out to a few other top-notch games I played this year that didn't get as much love:

Marvel's Midnight Suns is a fantastic hybrid of role-playing game and tactical strategy game. The closest thing I would compare it to is Nintendo's Fire Emblem series. The relationships you build and nurture between your superhero team are critical to developing an effective team. What's more, the stories of these characters getting to know one another are funny, heartfelt, and compelling, far more so than the main plot of the game. I never got tired of Tony Stark and Stephen Strange picking on one another or Blade being too shy to ask Captain Marvel on a date. All of that balances nicely against tight, well-constructed tactical combat missions that play out very differently depending on which superheroes join you as their powers are interesting and varied. The game is also wonderfully voice acted by such talented performers as Michael Jai White, Matt Mercer, Laura Bailey, Lyrica Okano, and Steve Blum among many others. Maybe it was because it released in December 2022, but this was a game that was criminally under-marketed and under-recognized.

Wartales is a brutal mercenary band simulator that released this year. This is a small subgenre and while it won't be for everyone, it will appeal to anyone who enjoys challenging strategy sims like Hairbrained Schemes' excellent game BattleTech. Wartales, from Shiro Games, puts you in command of a small band of mercenaries in a cruel, gritty low-magic world. Forget about heroic quests and magic swords. In this game, you're just trying to make sure you earn enough food to eat and that you don't get devoured by a pack of hungry wolves or murdered by brigands on the road. You go from town to town performing quests and attempting to grow your company, facing increasingly dangerous foes and eventually venturing into dungeons or crypts. The game alternates between an overland map where you slowly travel around, searching for or avoiding hazards, and the tactical battle map where you play out extremely challenging fights where it is not uncommon for your mercenaries to die. To make this increasingly punishing on yourself, make sure you name your mercs after friends and loved ones, so that when they inevitably bite it from disease or a cold blade through the gut, you'll truly mourn their loss.

Dyson Sphere Program is a deep and challenging factory management game in the same vein as the masterpiece Factorio. Technically still in early access, the game is fully featured and recently added combat and base defense mechanics that will be familiar to anyone who has played Factorio. What sets Dyson Sphere Program apart from its better-known cousin is the setting is more sci-fi and allows you to travel around planets in a solar system, eventually setting up interplanetary logistics systems with the goal of eventually building a Dyson Sphere around the local star. I find factory games like this to be the ultimate sort of puzzle game. Most puzzle games feature one or maybe two solutions, and there is a certain pleasure to be had in figuring out what the solution is. But factory games are more like a puzzle sandbox. There's not one solution to the puzzle - many different solutions will work and no one way will look the same as another. Be forewarned, play this and you will find yourself dreaming about conveyor belts!

Books in Review

I read a lot of great books this year and read all over the sci-fi and fantasy genres. While in past years, I read a lot of older stuff, this year I made a concerted effort to read more contemporary novels released in recent years. This meant that I read the first books of a lot of series, including Steven Erikson's notoriously challenging Gardens of the Moon, Jay Kristoff's Empire of the Vampire, Christopher Ruocchio's Empire of Silence, Pierce Brown's Red Rising, and more. I was also making an effort to read epic dark fantasy, which is why you see many of those titles. One of my reading goals next year is to pick one of these series and read through it. Currently I'm leaning towards Erickson's Mazatlan books since I grabbed them all in a Humble Bundle a few months ago for a steal.

In the sci-fi realm, Ray Nayler's Nebula-nominated The Mountain in the Sea was a standout title. It reminded me of Adrian Tchaikovsky's books in the depth of imagination that went into considering the ecological and social impacts and the way an alien mind might actually work. Nayler's book is wrenching, well-researched, thoughtful, insightful, and ultimately tragic in many ways. Speaking of sci-fi, M.V. Melcer's Refractions was another great read that I've discussed in previous blogs.

A pleasant surprise in the fantasy genre was Travis Baldree's Legends & Lattes. This "cozy fantasy" about a middle-aged adventurer who hangs up her battle axe to start a coffee shop and struggles with internal anxieties about starting her life over resonated with me in a lot of ways as someone trying to build a creative path myself. It was charming, easy to read, heartfelt, and overall just a delight. And I got the sequel (or prequel) Bookshops & Bonedust for Christmas, so I'll be reading that shortly!

Continuing on my dark fantasy research, I read eighteen volumes of the famous manga series BERSERK. While I appreciate the art style and Kintaro Muira's ability to build compelling characters, particularly in the early volumes, any recommendation of this work has to come with the caveat that it is extremely brutal and violent and contains particularly graphic scenes of sexual violence. After 18 volumes, I'm not sure I want to continue!

In the non-fiction realm, I really loved Ben Riggs' well-researched and fascinating book Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons. Riggs did extensive research and interviews of the early days of the creation of D&D, the founding of TSR, the creative figures involved in the growth and evolution of the game, and the staggeringly poor business decisions that ultimately brought the company and the brand to the brink of bankruptcy. Riggs manages to weave in the story of internecine business politics with personal stories of those who were living and working there at the time to create a really compelling book. For anyone who lived through that time and grew up playing D&D, this book is a big recommend.

Final Thoughts

Now for some of my writing stats. Zing!

Including this one, I published 18 blog posts this year. My series on the Dragon of Icespire Peak D&D campaign was far and away the most popular, so expect more D&D and TTRPG content next year. If there's one I hope more people read, it's my thought experiment on generative AI run amok.

Discounting the blog posts I shared with you on the mailing list, I sent you seven newsletters this year. I found this a great way to keep in touch and to recap on blog posts and news that you may have otherwise missed.

My website had over 2,300 visits this year, an increase of 1000% over 2022. Wow! And 29 of you joined the mailing list this year. Thank you!

Word counts can be a hard thing to track precisely, particularly because of rewriting and editing and tossing out whole chapters, but I can safely say I wrote more than 100,000 words on my current novel-in-progress, The Radiant and the Corrupt. I'll finish it in 2024 and hopefully move onto the sequel.

Finally, of course, I released two books this year in print: Assistant to a Judge of Hell & Other Stories and When Stars Move & Other Stories. It has been an absolute delight to hold these books in my hand and to be able to share them with others.

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I have truly appreciated and enjoyed the feedback that you all have shared on these books and on my writing this year. Thank you so much for reading and for supporting my creative work.

And, you know, do the things: share, comment, subscribe.

See you in 2024!

In keeping with the music theme from last week's post, this week I want to share with you one of my very favorite creations: an EP of electronic music I created in 2002 called "Kids Book Tunes." For those that want to just listen to the "Kids Book Tunes" EP and don't want the whole backstory, you can jump ahead.

"Kids Book Tunes" is one of my very favorite creations because it is so weird and it was born out of a burst of creative experimentation. Most of my creative works are fiction or occasionally poetry or game design where I spent weeks, months, and sometimes years designing, editing, and revising until it's as close to perfect as I can make it.

"Kids Book Tunes" was the opposite of that. "Kids Book Tunes" was born in a sporadic rush of creativity; working on it was so fun and batshit crazy that it's all I wanted to do in my free time for the few weeks it took me to create it.

So what is "Kids Book Tunes?" Well, you know those children's picture books that have a strip down the side with buttons that play a noise or song when you press them? That's right, the really obnoxious ones - often board books - that kids gnaw on and slobber all over and mash until the buttons don't work or the batteries die? Yeah, those! We called them "noisy books."

In the early 2000's, I worked for Half Price Books, and one of the great things about working at HPB was that we were allowed to borrow books pretty much whenever we wanted.

So one day, I got the bright idea to borrow about 20 or so different noisy books from the store. I took them home and recorded the sound clip of each button as a separate file. Most of the books had 8-10 of these so that gave me somewhere in the range of 150-200 sound samples to work with. I returned all the books (with no additional teeth marks or slobber).

Then I set down to create. Initially, I began simply assembling the samples together into different arrangements using very early version of Soundforge. I soon found that the raw samples themselves weren't very interesting. They lacked mid-range or bass tones and thus as songs were very squeaky. The volume levels were also wildly inconsistent.

Here are a couple of raw samples, one from the "Dumbo" noisy book and one from "The Itsy Bitsy Spider."

So, I began to experiment. I processed the samples through sound editors like Konvertor, Soundprobe, and FruityLoops to speed up, slow down, reverse, and pitch-shift the sounds to get different variations and tones.

I also created some accompanying samples outside of the noisy book samples. I recorded samples of myself playing a kalimba, which is an African-inspired thumb piano (basically metal keys attached to a sound board with a gourd on the back as a resonator), and a doumbek, which is a type of goblet drum commonly played in drum circles. Mine happens to be metal and has a tambourine mounted in the body, so it is capable of bright, brassy tones in addition to the deep central thumps.

Finally, I began playing around with a really fun piece of synth software called Sawcutter, which at the time was freeware. By simply painting notes with the mouse on the 16-bar measure grid, you could create very simple melodies. Then you could warp those melodies by directly messing with the waveform, the envelope, or by adding reverb, delay, distortion, or other effects. It is very basic by today's standards, but a lot of fun to play with. I programmed a very simple melody loosely inspired by Kansas's "Dust in the Wind." (Don't worry Kansas fans, no one is going to mistake my adaptation for Kerry Livgren's!)

Then I began to plug all of these combinations of synth melodies, pre-recorded rhythms, and edited kids book samples back into Soundforge and began to assemble them into increasingly complicated and, to my ear, interesting layers. I was creating purely for the joy of what I enjoyed hearing, working from only a crude understanding of music theory and songwriting but mostly just out of instinct.

I produced four songs: Song 1, Weird Shitsky, Russhin Bitz, and Dust in the Wind. I saved them and shared them on Mini Discs, which are a format that was even shorter-lived than CDs. (For those who haven't seen them, Mini Discs are what they sound like - essentially smaller versions of CDs that held about 80 MB of data, just enough for a handful of weird electronic songs.) I passed them around to friends who probably quickly chucked them in the trash and then I forgot about them.

Then, this year, while having a conversation with a friend about weird music, I thought about them and went to dig them up. There they were, in an archive folder on battered old hard drive: Kids Book Tunes. It was time to bring them back.

I thought YouTube would be the easiest way to share them, but that meant I needed visuals to go along with them! So I used Microsoft's Clipchamp software to assemble little video vignettes to accompany each tune.

And thus, I present to you the first public world premier of "Kids Book Tunes!" Enjoy!

Kids Book Tuneshttps://youtu.be/LLB6IEes9Kohttps://youtu.be/w16V7AU-2pshttps://youtu.be/FpJq60mpvLghttps://youtu.be/7gJ3yrDzg8Y

Thanks for reading, watching, and listening! I'm supposing these are probably the most unusual songs you have heard this week and I hope that you were either delighted or amused by them.

These songs are publicly available on YouTube. I invite you to share them with your friends, loved ones, or really anyone you want to impress or annoy.

And remember, subscribe to my newsletter for more fun stuff like this, free stories, recommendations, and more.

Music is a significant part of my emotional life. As an author, I use music to evoke the emotional theme and tone I'm trying to capture in a piece of writing. Music gets me in the mood of the story and I imagine that it pours in my ears, draining down into my subconscious, gets churned back up through my brain, and trickles down into my fingertips to infiltrate the story I am telling.

I strongly prefer instrumental soundtracks for writing music. Readers of mine will know the soundtrack to the game "Hyper Light Drifter" composed by Disasterpeace was a major source of thematic inspiration for my previous novel, "Gods of Sky and Dust."

My current work in progress, "The Radiant and the Corrupt," is a science fantasy epic incorporating themes of innocence, corruption, and redemption set against the backdrop of a world of demigods and otherworldy powers. Like with "Gods of Sky and Dust," for this project I have leaned heavily on video game soundtracks. In this case, I sought out music that felt epic in scale but contained the drama and intimacy of the personal. The soundtracks to "Elden Ring" and "Dark Souls III" have been absolutely perfect.

https://youtu.be/8k0QPEQxr24?si=hNH_X9gq-BYxE_fEhttps://youtu.be/JIT9aUHbcaI?si=V7IAKkld-yONKa5k

That's it for this week's post. It was really just an excuse to share some amazingly rich, dramatic, haunting, and sweeping music with you. I hope you enjoy them!

Do you have any favorite soundtracks or playlists that you listen to for creative inspiration? Share them in the comments below! If you liked this post, please share it.

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