Heroes and villains come and go, but traitors live on in infamy! The traitor does not just turn her back on the cause – she takes its secrets with her to the enemy’s camp! As a GM the traitor NPC can serve multiple roles. A traitor can add to the drama and tension of a story. The traitor can also serve a tactical role when he undermines the defenses of his former comrades. The traitor is a classic role in fiction that any GM can use to add some intrigue to the game.

Time to look at our cards! Here are three types of traitor NPCs for you to use in your game.

#1 – Just Plain Bad

This traitor has the simplest of motives. She sells out her friends for money, power, or something else of a similar and base nature. Perhaps she just wants to be on the side of the “winners”, or she wants to humiliate the PCs whom she is secretly envious of. It does not really matter, for in the end her motives are petty and self-indulgent. She is a traitor simply because she was never really dedicated to the cause in the first place.

#2 – Forced Into Treachery

This traitor wants to remain loyal to his cause, but something of even greater value to him is threatened by the enemy unless he does their bidding. Perhaps the enemy has materials that they are using to blackmail the traitor with, or maybe the traitor’s loved ones are being held hostage. The important detail to remember here is that the traitor is both the offender and the victim. This presents the PCs with a dilemma of their own: punish the treachery or help their suffering comrade?

#3 – On Your Side

She is a traitor like the others. She might even have motives similar to the others. There is one major difference though, because this traitor is defecting from the enemy camp to come join the PCs in their mission! Her reasons can range from noble to purely selfish ones, but she has information and skills that the PCs can use to their advantage. Whether or not the PCs trust her though is for the players to decide.

GMing Tactics to Use

The most important consideration for a GM when introducing a traitor NPC into the game is when will the actual betrayal take place. Timing is everything in this case. A good rule of thumb is that the less significant the NPC is to the story the sooner the betrayal should occur. Likewise the more significant the NPC is to the story the later the betrayal should occur.

Having that betrayal come to light at just the right moment is crucial to playing the traitor NPC. The impact of the betrayal from a tactical point of view is not nearly as important to your game, because good players can roll with those kinds of punches all day long. But if the NPC has earned the PCs’ trust over a long period of time (or has long been the recipient of their scorn in the case of traitor #3) then your players are going to have a bigger reaction to the revelation of the traitor’s true nature when it takes place.

Have an idea or two for what will occur if the PCs discover the traitor’s secret earlier than planned. My personal approach depends on the quality of the PC’s evidence. A mere hunch that an NPC is a traitor even if that hunch is correct is not going to help the PCs very much at all. Revealing that hunch to the traitor in the form of a “We’re on to you!” type speech is just going to make the traitor extra cautious in covering up his tracks.

If the PCs have some solid evidence though and can put all of the pieces together let the chips fall where they may. It can be great fun to watch your plan for an ambush against the PCs be reversed into an ambush against the traitor. Good GMs realize that forcing a game to go according to plan is far more risky than it is to adapt to what the players come up with.

So throw a traitor into your game and see what happens, and do not be afraid to twist the archetype to challenge your players even more!

How would you play a traitor in your game? Do you have your own variation on the traitor archetype? Perhaps a favorite tactic or two for dealing with treacherous NPCs? Leave a comment below and share your ideas with the rest of us!

(Want to provide anonymous feedback to me with the option to have me respond? Visit my SayAt.Me page and have at it!)

Characteristics:

It’s easiest to choose encounters by keeping in mind a few characteristics of the area in which the encounters will occur. Each of the following aspects can help choose both the frequency of different categories of encounter and the particular encounters that fit into that category. These characteristics only need to be classified as Low Medium or High and no more than a few seconds needs to be devoted to choosing each one. If you’re unsure if you should use Medium or High for a particular characteristic, just flip a coin and move on.

Life Level:
How alive is the area? How much diversity of plant and animal life is there? How much is there overall? Verdant forests, fertile grasslands, and vegetation-choked swamps all have high life levels while scorching deserts, rocky badlands and frigid tundras all have low life levels. The higher an areas life levels, the more slots should be in your final encounter table, and the more entries of each type.

Hazard Level:
How dangerous is it to live in this area? Do things live brutal short lives? Do you want lots of dangerous creatures? Is the area itself deadly? Different from life level which measures how many things and types of things live in an area, hazard level measures how often the things that do live there die.  Deadly mires, inhospitable crags, and plague pits all have high hazard levels.  Elven glades and  carefully tended farmlands have low hazard levels.

Difficult Terrain Density:
How easy is it to move around the area? How maneuverable do you have to be to chase or evade prey? Can you take an afternoon jog without breaking your ankle or falling to your death? Jagged rockpiles, sinking bogs and dense forests all have high difficult terrain densities, while rolling grasslands, ancient roadways and sunbaked dirt flats all have low terrain densities.

Resource Level:
What’s here that anyone wants? Are there mineral deposits? Can the land be farmed, timber or wildlife harvested? Is the area tactically or economically valuable? Rocky terrain with rich ore veins, coastal land, and defensible high points have high resource levels. trackless wastes, rocky scrublands, and intraversable mud pits have low resource levels.

Ecological niches:

With these characteristics in mind there are six ecological niches in which encounters can fall. In general one to four encounters from each niche will create a complete list though this can be tweaked to work with particular games, campaigns, and areas.  In general the higher an area’s life level and the lower it’s difficult terrain level, the larger the group it’s inhabitants should form.

Herbivores:
In this context, we’re defining herbivores as “Creatures that eat the environment” so while traditional herbivores fall in this category, wildly different environments like mine shafts, abandoned building, alternate planes and the like will have different sets of “Herbivores”. For the most part, we’re only interested in big nasty herbivores that regardless of whether they want to eat you or not will kick your ass for looking at them funny,large groups of herbivores that will trample you when spooked, or otherwise dangerous creatures. Rabbits are simply not an encounter unless they’re vorpal (and they’re still not herbivores).

Predators:
Usually predators are the most dangerous creatures in an area because they have to be able to kill and eat the rest of the population to survive. Again, depending on the mix of other creatures, what qualifies as a predator can be unusual. In a primal forest populated by plant creatures, that moose may well be your alpha predator.

Scavenger:
Creatures that eat other  dead creatures but aren’t above an occasional fresh meal, there are a huge variety of scavengers but they’re usually underrepresented in gaming resources especially for odd environments.  In a pinch lower level predators can fill the role of scavengers. The higher an area’s hazard levels the more scavengers can be found there.

Hazards:
Hidden deadly creatures such as vipers are hazards. Adapted to live is a high competition environment by being super lethal, but not super durable, they can often be handled as traps or skill checks. Unlike other encounter types, these are usually found singly and are most often found in areas with high hazard levels. Though most items on the list are creatures, hazards can be inanimate objects such as quicksand, pits etc…

Humanoids:
Able to live anywhere, there’s usually at least one group of humanoids living in or near any given area. Places will be hotly contested, and thus be home to more humanoids if they have high resource levels.

Elementals:
Some creatures have no ecological niche but live in areas simply because they are part of them.While this includes elementals, it might also include golems, fey, robots, or other weird creatures that are tied to a certain area and fall in no other category.

Putting it together:

Now you should have a list of creatures appropriate to your area that fill a variety of roles.  All that’s left is to put them on a table. Chances are there are one or two too few or too many to fit a convenient number, so just ditch a few or grab a couple of your second string choices, toss them on a table and you’re good to go.

A brief note on die choice: With a single die, all outcomes are equally likely. The more dice you use, the greater central tendency of your roll, and the rarer the high and low values. Using dice of unequal size on the same roll will create a small “plateau” of probabilities in the center. It’s in no way essential to sit and crunch numbers, but keep in mind that if you use 5d6 for your table, the probability of rolling a 5 or a 30 is .01% so don’t expect to ever see it.

Example:

Here is an example using Fenwood from my Location Template Article:

Name: Fenwood
Life: High
Hazard: High
Difficult Terrain: High
Resource: Low

Herbivores: catoblepas, giant beaver, elk
Predators: vampire, crocodile, cougars
Scavengers: giant beetle, mold men, dire crow
Hazards: viper, ant swarm, quicksand
Humanoids: swamp gnomes
Elementals: dark fey, living plants

2d8
2 – vampire
3 – catoblepas
4 – giant beaver
5 – crocodile
6 – giant beetle
7 – ant swarm
8 – swamp gnomes
9 – quicksand
10 – elk
11 – cougar
12 – mold men
13 – dire crow
14 – viper
15 – living plants
16 – dark fey

It’s that time of the year again, where as a belated holiday gift, I hand out my accumulated B-string campaign ideas from the previous year. Lucky you!  The real gift however, is the ideas in the comments section from readers.

These are not only great campaign ideas, but they can be dropped into an ongoing game as a new location hook. And if you’re on the lookout for a new campaign idea, maybe for New Year New Game? don’t forget that we have 3 years worth of previous articles.

Play Within a Play:
Based on a joke character I ran years ago, this campaign has two layers. The inner layer is a standard campaign in a normal system.  The outer layer is that you’re not playing that game. You’re playing the players of that game. To that end each PC has a handful of skills (resolved like bennies) such as “Bribe the GM’s sweet tooth” “Flirt with the GM” “Find rule loophole” or “Cheat like a madman”. In addition to these game-breaking skills which can be used to twist the game in your favor,  the meta-players are a dysfunctional lot, so “in character” arguments about loot division, cheating, or who slept with who’s girlfriend, intra-party backstabbing, and general asshattery are the rules of the day.  Have fun with it!

Better late than never:
Originally conceived around White Wolf’s Vampire game, An elder vampire learns of a ghost ship drifting in the sea near an isolated port. This ship was delivering a powerful artifact and diplomats. The PC’s elders want these, but they have one problem: It’s not their city. The PCs are transported to the city and tasked with grabbing and holding control of enough of it to receive the lost ship and it’s contents when it finally docks.  While written for Vampire, with minor tweaks it could work for almost any setting.

Dwarven Junkyard:
Dwarves are prolific builders, engineers and mechanics, but even dwarven technology breaks down and gets obsolete from time to time and is thrown into one of the “bottomless” chasms near their underground cities. In these nighted depths, tribes of humanoids of all types fight for the precious resources from above led by their cargo cult shaman and tinker kings, jury rigging and repurposing what they can and quarreling over choice caches of refuse.

What about you? What campaigns do you have backburnered that you’re unlikely to ever run?

Yet the really good part of this article is sure to be the comments, because I want you to suggest non-gaming items that make great gifts for GMs. Big, small, frugal, expensive – as long as it makes a GM happy tell me about it! For now, let’s proceed with gift idea #1.

Dizzy Doug’s DIY “On Air” Light

I made one of these for my home office and it rocks!

My wife and kids know that if this light is on that I am working on either a professional or a personal project. This makes my prep time more effective, because I have experienced less interruptions. I also discovered that it is a great way to keep outsiders from interrupting a game while it is in session too. In particular the under the age of nine footie pajama wearing outsiders in my home (they get to join us during a special half hour “kids break”).

Dizzy Doug explains how you can make one of these lights for less than $20. I added an external power supply to mine for about $5, so that low batteries would not be an issue for me.

I am so happy with this DIY project that I am making a second light that is green and will shine the words “Game on!” to everyone at the table. I hope that by adding such an obvious visual reminder that my game sessions will be more focused and run a bit faster. I must give credit to our own DNAphil for this idea.

I tend to be very appreciative of homemade gifts. Some of my fondest gifts were ones that someone crafted by hand, so I know that if I was a GM and someone made one of these for me that I would be sincerely grateful. Something about it just says “We respect the work that you do.” A group of players could do worse in joining forces to give the GM a gift (hint to players: your GMs do not want the “extended” version of your orphan loner’s back story).

LiveScribe Smartpen

I am a note taking fiend and whether at work, prepping for a game, or at the game table I always have a pen and paper handy. The problem is that pen and paper notes are difficult to search, and sometimes confusing. Exactly what was I thinking when I wrote down “thunder, pie, & submarine”?

Recently I bought a smartpen from LiveScribe, and those days are now behind me. With this pen and the special paper notebooks I can record the audio of my game session (get permission first of course) and my notes will be in sync with the recording. I can then tap on that confusing note and hear a player say:

“I have a plan. We’re going to need Zak’s boots of thunder to deliver a special pie to Baron Ook’s submarine.”

Granted, I still have no idea what any of that means but at least I now know why I wrote it down in the first place.

The pen also comes with a free subscription to Evernote Premium (a $45 value, and not a bad non-gaming gift for GMs too might I add). After setting up some “shortcuts” in the LiveScribe desktop software I can write a shortcut’s name on the page and select notes to be sent to a pre-determined Evernote notebook with tags.

Just create a notebook for your campaign in Evernote and you can now have all of your notes in digital format accessible from any web browser. Evernote will also run OCR software against your handwritten notes so that you can search them for text. How cool is that? I was already an avid Evernote user (it is why I bought this pen to begin with), so this Evernote integration functionality is my favorite feature of the smartpen device.

It is not cheap though. I bought the cheapest 2GB Echo model smartpen ($100), four notebooks ($18), extra ink cartridges ($5), and a portfolio case ($25) for about $150. At that those prices the players in a group could all contribute reasonable amounts to get their GM one of the pens and some notebooks.

What are your gift ideas?

Sure, you can always give a GM the gift of free GMing advice by providing a link to Gnome Stew, or maybe pop down a few bucks for these amazing books that we gnomes just happened to write, but what non-gaming items do you think make great gift ideas for GMs? Leave a comment below and share your gift giving wisdom with the rest of us.

(Thunder, pie, and submarine? *sigh* Looks like another TPK is on the horizon…)

Models Not Required

While 3D modeling packages have routinely been out of the reach of most of us either due to price or complexity. They require you to hunt down skeletal models, textures, and thats before you start wrestling with using the software.

Enter EVE Online, the MMORPG/space simulator published by CCP, available for both Windows and OS X. What you may not realize is that this game includes an incredibly robust avatar creator, the likes of which we haven’t had available for mere mortals to use until now.

This does come with a few caveats:

• The client is a multi-GB download
• The trial is free, but will end after two weeks. Ultimately CCP wants you to subscribe to their game. You could create a new account, however.
• Humans only — aliens need not apply
• For anything beyond a head shot, your only clothing options are modern/sci-fi in appearance

A blow-by-blow tutorial is beyond the scope of this post, however I do encourage you to visit some of the work done over at Dead End Thrills. Absolutely. Breath. Taking.

If you are interested in some great tips on using the avatar creator, take a look at this nice tutorial.

What’s really neat about the editor is that you can adjust the background, lighting, pose your character, and even adjust their emotional responses!

Why Bother?

Visual aides are great inspiration in your games, be it people, places, or objects. Certainly in the quest to make a memorable NPC being able to easily provide a photorealistic portrait for your key characters can only help. Clearly your players will appreciate the tool as well, if so inclined. Also see Phil’s article on tips for using character portraits in your games.

Have any portraits to share? Link them below!

With our first two cards, we were off to a good start.  The island on the back of a whale is a unique, fun location card. It implies a greater area of an ocean or sea, and it’s apparently inhabited by a tribe of exceptionally sneaky goblins.

After a few more turns our world has a garden with a magic apple, a chasm full of bats, a giant mushroom swamp, a hole in the sky inhabited by swarms of man-eating magic birds and a strange sea where not even the laws of magic apply. (click for a larger view)

There are two things of note in the setup at this point:

First, the position in which we’ve laid out the cards indicates the general layout of the areas in the world.  Thus, for example, the garden with the magic apple and the mushroom swamp are on opposite shores of the sea with Whale Island.  When you finalize the map and sketch it out, you can shift or firm up these relationships as you see fit.

Second, The Sea of madness includes the detail “Zones of wild magic”.  When I made this card, I made it as a world detail card, intending for it to apply to the world as a whole, but when my wife played it, she chose to make it a feature of just the sea of madness. This is perfectly valid, and is one of the best parts of 1KBWC. By allowing everyone to riff off of and use each other’s ideas, you inspire each other, include everyone’s ideas, and have access to more ideas than your own.

We also have several cards set aside in our world detail track, an area for details that apply to the whole world, including the demonic origin of magic, a historical plague with a linked artifact, and a mad golem that wanders the world. Similar to the zones of wild magic which was intended as a world detail but ended up as a location detail, the Copper Man was originally intended as a location detail, but ended up being a world detail (described as “an old married couple who can’t decide where exactly they’re going in a car that never runs out of gas”).

At the end of the session, most of our locations have been expanded:

Whale Island is the resting place of a forgotten petrified god:

The hole in the sky is home to a benevolent thunder god:

The garden is now home to an evil nymph and celestial tree sloths:

The great chasm is home to several sub locations and a race of dwarves:

New locations have been added, such as the Red desert, the ruins of a great civilization, with several notable features: the sands of time, and the Living mountain, which itself is home to tiny flying yetis.

Our final layout looks like this (click for larger view):

and our finalized world detail track included some more cards, including  more details on the artifact mentioned earlier and a completely unrelated plague (or is it…?) that’s an example of more than one player having the same idea.

In retrospect re-using cards from the last time we ran a test of world gen using 1KBWC led to similar combinations of cards (for example, the garden is fairly unchanged from the previous game, and the Living Mountain had tiny flying yetis both times). That makes re-using cards a bit of a tradeoff. It saves time at the expense of originality. If you don’t mind some locations similar from game to game, that’s not a problem.  If you’d rather use all new cards but don’t want the chore of making 60 cards during a single game, consider explaining the rules to your group ahead of time and giving them a week to come up with 10-15 cards apiece, or just creating a decent sized stack before play yourself.

Similarly, remember that specifics are NOT your friend. Cards that require other cards to exist first (unless they already exist) or that tightly define a location or detail are difficult to play or difficult to play other cards with.

Aside from these few concerns, I heartily endorse 1KBWC as a world generation method, and I hope this example helps illustrate this fun tool for other GMs.

The problem was that my encounter table was a god-awful spaghetti mess (and not a good spaghetti, like Walt’s spaghetti mysteries, the bad kind like messy convoluted Spaghetti computer code). I’ve duplicated what I vaguely remember it looking like (click for a larger version), but this is probably only a fraction of the mess. It’s been a long time. In fact, since the encounters loop, while not probable, it’s completely possible to get “stuck” in a far-too-long loop of encounters that are almost ridiculous in sequence. Luckily you have a human interpreter, but taken as writ, the original table is rife with something I like to call “OhGodWhy?”.

The problem is, of course, how do you embed incredibly dense data and probabilities into an encounter table without endless rolling which eats up game time and is just annoying to do?

Simple. I just got myself a die 10million.

O.K. truth be told, no such product exists, but they’re incredibly easy to make.  If you didn’t accidentally click through to this website on your search for ceramic lawn gnomes, you’re familiar with the concept of the d100.  The d100 works because our numbering system is base 10, so the number 157, for example, actually means we have 1 10^2s, 5 10^1s, and 7 10^0s. Since we can only have 10 of any given category before it advances to the next, a d100 is simply rolling for a random numbers of 1s and a random number of 10s in our number.  The d10million works the exact same way. It’s a collection of 7 d10s, each one representing a digit of our final number. The only problem is that the traditional “which one was which position” and “let me sort these to the right order” problems of a d100 are multiplied sevenfold.  Enter stage left: your grandmother’s pill reminder.  You’re probably also familiar with the seven-compartment pill boxes that help old fogies like me and your grandma keep which pills we’ve taken and not taken for the week straight. All you have to do is put one die in each compartment, and shake, and you randomize all seven dice simultaneously with the only problem being that it’s fairly bulky, for a die.

I like this craft box from the CraftMates Lockables line that I picked up at my local Hobby Lobby (Grab a fook while you’re there!) because it’s got a locking bar that keeps the compartments from popping open and my dice flying all over the room, but any clear case without markings on the top that would obscure the dice inside will do.

Note my clever usage of Roy G. Biv above. That little detail also allows me to color code charts and such for quick reference. Maybe next time I hit my FLGS, I’ll grab a complete set of seven matching brand properly colored d10s and make my d10million look extra nice. Hell, my red die isn’t even a d10, it’s one of those mutant d20s from the 80s/90s that has 1-10 twice!

The main advantage of the d10million isn’t that it can generate a random number between 1 and 10million. I’m not so much of a nerd that I don’t think that’s blatant overkill.  Instead, it’s the fact that you’re rolling up to seven dice simultaneously.  In the same fashion as rolling an attack and damage roll all at once during combat can greatly speed combat, rolling seven dice at once with the d10million allows you to speed up processes that you would never attempt without it.

Now with this tool, a portion of my encounter table might look like this (again, click for a blowup) which is not only readable and usable, but allows for more individual tailoring of results and eliminates nonsense results.

So think about it. What processes are you using that rolling seven dice simultaneously could improve? What processes have you wanted to use but are too cumbersome to use without a d10million?

I recently dropped into Pier One to kill some time, and wouldn’t you know it: I walked out with a new gaming widget. Behold the false tome of holding!

Why a false tome, you ask?

I thought this might make an even awesomer dice box than the one I posted about a little while back (my cigar box GMing screen), so I prowled the store and found the smallest one they had — it’s the perfect size, about 9x6x2.

They also had several other larger sizes, and those looked even more like cool fantasy tomes than mine, but they were too big to be easily portable.

When I brought it to our Star Trek game for the first time, my whole group thought it was just a cool book — and when they found out it was a box, they all perked up.

Two of them made plans to check these out for storing Warhammer: Invasion cards, which got me thinking: You could easily use the larger versions of this box to store all sorts of gaming-related stuff.

The size I bought was $15. It’s lined, so dice don’t clatter too loudly when I roll them in there; some of the larger sizes were unlined. I didn’t price the larger sizes, but I’d guess they climbed into the $30 range. If you go looking for them, walk the whole store — they use them as accents in different places, rather than putting them all in one spot.

If you share my obsession with dice boxes, storage solutions, and other widgets that can be repurposed for gaming, get thee to a Pier One and check these out!

Update: Razjah pointed out in the comments that he’d suggested false tomes — “fooks” — in the comments on the cigar box GMing screen article that I linked to. Five months is an eternity when you have a two-year-old, and I’d forgotten all about Razjah’s suggestion when I wrote this article. Sorry about that, Razjah — and thank you again for the suggestion!

Razjah also noted the magnetic closure, which I forgot to mention here. It’s small but strong, and does a great job of keeping the tome closed when you want it closed.

1000 Blank White Cards

Start with a rough understanding of what you’re creating (game system, genre, etc…) so that everyone is on the same page and then play 1KBWC. This variant uses only three types of cards: Locations, Location Details, and World Details, all explained below, and requires a relatively sizable play area. Otherwise, it plays much like the original game. If you’re not familiar with the rules of 1KBWC, you can read them here.

Location Cards:
Location cards are the heart of this variant. They have the name of a location, a picture, and if necessary a short description or a few details written underneath.  Resist the temptation, however to add more than a sentence or so. Part of the fun is allowing the locations to “grow organically”. These locations can be as macro or micro as you desire. Countries, forests, haunted houses, lakes, monster dens, and hidden chambers are all fair game.

Location cards are played into a communal play area wherever you desire with their relative positions representing rough map locations (unlike the base game there is only one area and ownership is irrelevant).  Thus if the “Ruined Hilltop Keep” is placed on the table to the right of the “Living Mountain”, The keep is roughly to the East of the mountain in the finished game world.

Location cards can also be “nested” inside or outside of one another. If “Island on the back of a whale” is in play, another player can play “Twisting underground maze” as a sub-location of Island on the back of a whale (presumably the entrance is the whale’s blowhole) and another might play “ocean of madness”, making the whale island a sub location of the ocean.  There’s no limit to how many sub locations a location can contain or how far you can “nest” locations aside from common sense. However, each location you nest within another is a location not on your map, so keep an idea of the right balance of quantity versus density of locations that you want.

Location Details:
Location Detail cards have an item, group, organization, individual or the like on them. Their purpose is to add some additional details to locations and populate your world. Like Location cards, they feature a name, a picture, and a short description.  Location Detail cards can only be placed within locations and apply only to the location in which they are placed.

World Details:
World Detail cards include details that pertain to the entire world. Gods, planes, details of the cosmos, histories, ubiquitous races, organizations, and technologies, hazards, and other world-spanning items belong on World Detail cards.  These cards feature a name, picture, and some details.  These cards are placed in a special area off to the side of the map. In general, the order these cards are played makes no difference, but if they represent past events, the order they’re played or arranged will form a sort of timeline for the world. Many Location Detail cards and World detail cards are interchangeable.  A race card placed in a location appears only there.  Placed in the world detail area, it is found throughout the entire world. Items, technologies, and other cards can be placed in either area similarly.

Locations also have the capacity to be a major prep time-sink. Good locations are a centerpiece of your game, but it’s easy to spend far too much time and effort micro-detailing a location for the payoff you’re going to get from it.

To help with both of these potential problems I propose a quick and dirty location template which lists key components of locations and is small enough for a notecard or half sheet of paper. Each entry on the template is meant to be a sentence or two, not a complete book, so it’s quick and easy to do and after your location templates are finished you have a handy reference for when you need your location’s cliff notes.  Once a template is finished, you’re ready to start designing dungeons, encounters, adventures etc… based in them just like you normally would. This template works for any location of any size, but it’s intended for an area that’s more or less homogeneous, so large locations that contain several distinct areas (like a kingdom) are best broken down further into smaller locations.

The template:

Location Name: This is a few words that are memorable and convey the feeling of the location. These names are for your own personal use and reference. The “official” name of the location as used by NPCs in the game and the PCs may be different, but a quick evocative name will help remind you what you want the location to be.

Ambiance: This section should briefly convey the look and feel of the location. It’s meant to be a spark for your descriptions of the area during play.  Even though they’re all forests, “Ancient growth forest peppered with Elven ruins”, “Marshy willow forest” and “Bramble-dense sapling grove” are all distinct.

History: Especially avoid writing a novel here. This should just be a few notes on the history of the location to make sparking adventure and sub-location ideas easier. Something like “Once held by elves, fell into ruin. Now a haven for several nasty goblin clans” will work fine.

Encounters: This is not a defined encounter list or wandering monster list. Instead this is just a short list or few sentences about what kinds of encounters the players will find in this location for use when you DO create encounter lists, adventures, and wandering monster tables. “Standard creatures for this environment” is fair game, although most locations should have a little more to go on than that. “Lots of inter-goblin skirmishes”, “Dark Fey dominate this area”, or even “Ol’ One-eye the unique griffin inhabits these woods” are perfect.

Treasures: Most locations are assumed to have standard treasure, but any special treasure considerations should be noted here. Check out previous articles “Seven Ways to Spice up your treasure” and it’s follow up “Seven more ways to spice up your treasure” for examples and inspiration.

Hooks and Hotspots: An optional part of the template, this section is for adventure hooks and “Hotspots” (unique, important or special sub-locations) that aren’t implied by virtue of earlier sections.  If we mentioned that our woods are inhabited by goblins and full of elven ruins, it’s assumed that there are goblin lairs and elven ruins around and that “exterminate the goblins” or “Explore the ruins” are available hooks, but a good non-implied hook might be finding the goblin hedge mage who can teach the PCs the local goblin dialect and a good hotspot might be the hidden crypt of the elven royal line.

Here’s a pair of examples:

Name: Fenwood
Ambiance: A thick forest full of twisted drooping trees, Fenwood’s soil is marshy and fallen leaves conceal many pockets of stagnant water and quicksand.
History: Largely avoided for it’s long held reputation for being haunted and dangerous, Fenwood has little in the way of a history.
Encounters: Fenwood is home to normal forest and swamp creatures. In addition a tribe of primitive cannibalistic gnomes spy and prey upon visitors. A number of dark fey lovingly tend the sickened trees and rotten bogs and eagerly capture slaves.
Treasure: In addition to treasure captured from adventurers, the swamp gnomes craft powerful woven totems and the Dark Fey have many pieces of living sculpture and jewelry with it’s own disturbing beauty.
Hooks and Hotspots: The swamp gnomes’ cannibalism and dark fey’s slavery make rescue missions common Fenwood hooks. In the center of the forest, the dark fey hold a Stonehenge-like altar to a Shub-Niggurath-esque deity.

Name: Ash Flats
Ambiance: A dreary desert of ash studded with fist-sized irregularly shaped igneous rock and the occasional bit of metal or stoneware debris, the monotony of the ash flats is broken only by the occasional drifting fire mote (small slowly drifting permanent portals to the elemental plane of fire) or dust storm. At night, the ash flats look like a massive swarm of fireflies as motes and elemental vermin criss-cross the landscape.
History: The site of a one-grand Elven forest city, a magical accident created dozens of fire motes and burned the city and surrounding forest to the ground.
Encounters: No natural creatures can survive in the bleak wasteland of the ash flats, and the drifting motes prevent regrowth of plants. However, vermin from the plane of fire routinely cross through the fire motes and slowly and painfully burn out unless they can return or find fuel. Below the insulating ash, colonies of fire rats burrow retaining heat and returning to the plane of fire through fire motes that drift below ground level.
Treasure: Elemental vermin carry no treasure although their burnt out bodies may contain small crude gemstones. The flats themselves however are studded with debris that survived the incineration of the city, weathered items made of metal, stone, or ceramics are common. Large burrows of elemental vermin often horde these.
Hooks and Hotspots: Somewhere beneath the ash lies the ritual circle that sustains the fire motes. Finding and ending this effect will allow the ash flats to recover although dangerous creatures from the plane of fire may notice and interfere.

This past week, I finished entering and rating my entire RPG collection on RPGGeek, something I’ve been putting off for two years. I first posted about RPGG — which is part of Geekdo, the umbrella site that also includes BoardGameGeek and VideoGameGeek — almost exactly two years ago: Geekdo.com: Pure, Distilled Awesome.

RPGG is an amazing tool, and one that many GMs — and gamers in general — could benefit from using. It hasn’t yet gained the traction within the RPG community that I think it deserves.

So why aren’t more gamers using it? And why did it take me so long to really start using it myself?

RPGG is powerful

Since 2009, RPGG has gone on to be nominated for an ENnie for Best Website and has grown by leaps and bounds. Many, many RPGs I couldn’t find in the database in 2009 are now in there, and a lot of the site’s other corners have been filled out.

At its heart, RPGG is a database, the infrastructure around it, and the community around that. Like BGG, it’s one of the friendliest and most welcoming communities on the web, well-moderated and generally populated by nice, intelligent folks.

It’s no overstatement to say that BoardGameGeek changed my boardgaming life. I own, play, and enjoy more boardgames now than ever before, and not just by a little, by a lot. For me, BGG has been an eye- and door-opener in the same way that getting my first iPod rekindled and expanded my love of music. RPGGeek has already started changing my gaming life, and I expect it to keep doing so.

The real ultimate power: Rating your collection

Unfortunately for me, RPGG’s birth coincided with having Lark and starting work on Eureka, and the prospect of entering and then rating my substantial RPG collection was just too daunting.

So after getting a solid start, I put it off for two years.

Now that it’s done, I can attest to the power of rating RPGs. Nothing focuses my opinions and clarifies my tastes quite like rating things.

When I rated my whole music library, I figured out what I really liked and started seeking out music that was more directly to my tastes. I listen to a lot more music now, and I like what I listen to more.

When I rated my boardgames, both owned and played, I figured out what I really liked and started buying and playing much better games, and having more fun playing them. Why play bad games?

When I rated my RPGs, including actual books, game lines, and games played (more on this in a minute), I figured out what I really liked — and I fully expect to spend more time playing the games that are right for me now that it’s all there in cold, hard numbers.

Here are a couple of links to what I’ve rated so you can get a feel for how this looks on the actual site: every RPG I’ve ever played and every gaming product I own (except magazines — I haven’t done those yet). You can click on “Rating” to sort by ascending/descending, if you like.

RPG Items and RPGs: A smart division

The key to the RPGG database is that it’s divided into types, the two biggest of which are RPG Items and RPGs (there are also useful types like Setting, Family, and others).

RPG Items are products (physical or digital). You can rate RPG Items whether you’ve played them or not — everyone feels differently about that. I rate all of mine, because unlike boardgames it’s not hard to tell whether an RPG will be good or not just by reading it. Ratings are a journey, not a destination; they’re supposed to change over time.

RPGs are the games themselves, only to be rated if you’ve played them. I’ve rated over 575 RPG Items, but only about 60 RPGs. Even if I’ve only played a game once, I rated it; that’s a less nuanced rating than the one for a game I’ve played for years, but still useful.

Rating items is interesting, and made some surprising things clear to me — like the fact that although D&D 4e books with lots of crunch are well-written and -designed, by and large I hate that design; they got low ratings.

But it’s the RPGs that really shine a light on your tastes. The system is set up for rating games based on how well they suit your personal tastes and how much you want to play them, and it’s a harsh mistress. Games I spent years playing but in retrospect really didn’t enjoy got low ratings despite the nostalgia; games I’ve only played a few times that hit all my hot buttons got high ratings.

If you’ve read D&D Is Like a Crazy Ex I Keep Going Back To, you know that I have a problem when it comes to playing games I’m not really enjoying without fully realizing what I’m doing. Rating my collection will go a long way towards solving that problem.

Really digging into RPGG is work — but rewarding work

And really, that’s a lot like GMing itself: It’s work, but by and large you love it anyway.

Sure, you can sign up for a free account and just hang out in the forums and take advantage of the tools the site offers, but to really get the most out of RPGG you need to rate your games.

The site itself, despite being very well documented and having tools to help you navigate it, can also be intimidating — it’s incredibly information-dense. All that information is a large part of why it’s so awesome, but it also steepens the learning curve a bit.

A personal recommendation

Head over to RPGG and sign up for an account. It’s free, and also gets you access to BGG and VGG (I love BGG, but don’t use VGG).

Then search for and add to your collection every RPG you’ve ever played (which you do by marking them as “owned”), and rate them all. Write a comment if you like; I find that helpful, and I love reading others’ comments.

If that doesn’t reveal something about your tastes that you didn’t already know, or crystallize your opinion about a game or two, maybe RPGG isn’t for you. But if it does — and I think it well — then you’re down the rabbit hole, and I suspect you’ll get a lot out of the site.

There’s more to love about RPGG than just the ratings — like I said, it’s a great community, and there are many other tools there, as well — but it’s the ratings that provide me with the most concrete return on my time investment.

A side note

I was selected to be RPGG’s Geek of the Week this week, the 83rd since the site’s inception — which was the impetus for getting my whole collection cataloged and rated.

If you’d like to drop by and ask me questions about being a huge dork, I’d love to hear from you.

What do you have in your GM’s kit? Tell us by leaving a comment below.

It’s not that I have anything against dry-erase markers. On the contrary, a dry-erase initiative tracker and a basic Flip-Mat brand  5-foot base map are both fine GMing tools that have a place at my table.

(And yes, I realize, they are just smaller versions of the same thing.)

My resistance to the mounted whiteboard was my fear of falling into the trap of becoming what I can only call for lack of a better term, “a chalkboard professor.” You know the type, the teacher who spends the entire class lecture with his nose facing the chalkboard instead of engaging with his students.

I didn’t want to become that GM, the one who spent the session with his back to the players because he was so engrossed — or by necessity, so devoted to making changes onto — the information on the whiteboard. The fun for me is, in part, seeing the  reactions on the other players’ faces as they cope with the challenges being presented to them. The last thing I want was to be a slave to the whiteboard.

An opportunity of scale

My whiteboard drawing skills displayed

But I recently had two occasions for using a whiteboard for good effect. In both instances — the first was for infiltrating a fortress, and the second, for defending a city — I essentially needed a wall-sized battle map that was grander in scale than anything I could reproduce in 5-foot squares on the table.

In fact, as the PC’s progress in level (we’re at Level 10 +), more and more of the challenges are beyond the scope of what fits neatly into 5-foot tactical maps.

Anyone who GMs using the 3.5/Pathfinder rules will have to confront this reality of scale, eventually. The monsters get bigger, the range of effects of great spells becomes grander and the storylines, hopefully, become more epic. While you can still use tactical maps/miniatures in some situations, the fact is, many situations will demand a greater reliance on narrative play. The GM can either embrace this bigness — and use tools such as the whiteboard to represent encounter areas measured in square miles — or shift the scale of the table battlemaps to correspond. Either is a valid approach.

(I am reminded of a beautiful poster map that came in Dungeon 135 depicting the top of the Spire of Long Shadows, the encounter area for the final battle against the 660 hit point wormgod, Kyuss, to conclude the Age of Worms adventure path. But as I looked at it, the only only thing I could think of was: “There is no way one could contain this final battle to a 100-foot diameter circle. This is world-shaking stuff, and this just isn’t big enough!”)

Of course, as a fellow who loves to build terrain out of plaster and paint, this is a tough admission. I want to provide tactical layouts for the players and their figs. In “Back to the Future,” when Doc Brown apologizes to Marty because his magnificent model layout of Hill Valley’s downtown is neither painted or “to scale,” I have to chuckle, because I can identify. But many of these adventures deserve more than a generic tabletop landscape.  A detailed battlemap on whiteboard is a good way to go.

Lessons learned

Split the party?

If you think two rooms stocked with monsters in a dungeon is temptation to split the party, how about a whole city? PCs may well scatter to the four corners of the map. Let them. The trick is to run it as a single encounter, holding to the initiative order, even though they are spread out. Just remember to be true to movement rates over great distances. Help takes a long time to arrive if it’s coming from one end of the battle area to the other.

Colors

As an organizational tool, different colored markers can be a big help (especially if the party splits).

Magnetic markers

If your board uses these, I recommend getting some. It beats erasing PC positions if you can just shift them on the board. It also frees the GM from falling into the “chalkboard professor” effect. You move the marker, then turn back to face the table.

Role-play the possibilities

Don’t be afraid to mix in your role-play with your rollplay, whether it’s between or during skirmishes.

How the pros do it

It’s worth noting that Pathfinder RPG designer Jason Bulmahn loves his whiteboard, which figures prominently in his Weekly Grind (there are links to his corresponding Facebook page). I recommend checking it out — both for free adventure material from a prominent designer, but also to marvel at his artistic/mapmaking skills.

What do you think?

So, what’s your experience with the whiteboard? Does it fit with your GMing style? Do you have any recommendations for using the whiteboard more effectively?

If you’ve been waiting for the standalone PDF edition of our latest book, Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game, your wait is over!

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Our graphic designer and layout guru, Darren Hardy, does an amazing job on our PDF editions.

This PDF is DRM-free, so you can easily cut and paste NPCs into your adventure notes. It’s also extensively bookmarked (all 1,000 NPCs are bookmarked by name, as are all major sections) and hyperlinked.

And on top of the utility of Matt Neagley’s three excellent indexes, you also get full searchability: Pick a keyword, like a Trait, to search for, and pull up all instances of that keyword in the entire book. We tested it on a range of devices, and it looks great on all of them; several folks have commented on how well it works on their tablets.

If you’re still on the fence, why not check out reviews of Masks or download a 17-page PDF excerpt from the book that includes 18 ready-to-use NPCs?

While no single approach is ideal for everyone, this article will focus on how I’ve been using index cards, along with some ideas that I’ve seen in use, so please excuse the ‘in my campaign’ tone of it. As usual, feel free to take what’s shiny and share your own uses for index cards.

Card Management

I use 200-card cases to manage my cards. They fit perfectly in the boxes I use for GMing, the cases conveniently hold two decks of the Savage Worlds Action Deck (of oversized cards for initiative), and I never needed more than 200 cards at the table. Most of the cases I’ve seen come with dividers.

As mentioned in the last article, NPC character sheets are printed onto 3 x 5 cards. The NPC cards for my recently-ended fantasy campaign were divided into named NPCs, humanoids, other critters, elementals, and infernals. Your mileage may vary, and probably should, because the campaign focused pretty heavily on the last two categories. As the case filled up with NPC cards, I realized that having over a hundred ready-to-use NPC stats at your fingertips is a Good Thing.

Additional cards (location, organization, reward/item, rules, etc) were stashed in the pocket of a 5”x8” padfolio, along with whatever cards I knew I’d need for the session.

At the Table

The bulk of my index cards were NPC cards. I’d pull cards out at the beginning of the encounter and turn them face down until the critter actually showed up. Bennies are placed on Wild Card NPCs, and initiative cards are placed on top of the NPC card. I’d keep notes on the padfolio, and hand over reward/item cards to the players as needed.

Here’s a quick pic of my GMing station; you can see the green poker chip Bennies and eight of clubs initiative card atop the NPC index card.

In systems with complex modifiers, index cards make great reminders of the rules. Oh, the wailing and gnashing of teeth from my D&D 3.5 players when the dreaded “narrow and low” card appeared…

Got a pretty complicated map? Put a legend on an index card. Heck, create one for each player.

Index cards are great for repetitive initiative systems, such as D&D 3.x and 4e. Well before the encounter, pre-roll the critters’ initiative, and sort the cards in order. Add the PCs to the mix as they roll initiative. Anyone holding or delaying gets their card turned sideways. You can even make notes (“Held”, etc) on the cards.

Index cards are perfect for tracking valuable items. Do your players all claim to be wearing the Ring of Regeneration? Not if there’s only one card of it. Don’t remember if you used that Potion of Stupendous Healing? If you ripped it in half, you drank it.

Players having trouble remembering the details of their spells/powers/abilities? Print them out on an index card. (Many printers can print on cardstock, as long as they have a straight-through paper path.)

Do your novice players need a simple cheat-sheet? One might fit on an index card.

Does your game have more than a few conditions that may affect characters? Put one each on index cards for quick reference.

Tired of spelling out names for your players? Write them on index cards.

Convention game? Have each player write their name and their character’s name on a tented index card.

Passing notes? Index card, folded.

Sleeping player? You got it – index cards can be hurled with great accuracy.

When you really get down to it, there are very few gaming tools with more versatility than the lowly index card. I’ve only touched on a few of their possible uses, and surely y’all can come up with far more. Sound off in the comments and let us know!