Inspired by playing the new updates to Blades in the Dark and a recent discussion on the best way to use information gathering skills like perception and investigation, I wanted to share a technique that's quickly become a fundamental part of my DM toolbox when it comes to designing scenarios in D&D and other TTRPGS.
This technique is useful for building individual encounters, but can scaled up to provide structures for entire sessions or adventures. It's the closest I've come to formalizing the supposed "exploration" pillar of gameplay that WotC is so fond of mentioning but never provided any rules for.
Here's the rundown:
Figure out what your party is trying to accomplish (gather information, rescue a hostage, get through a door to the next area of the dungeon)
Establish at least one or more threats that would impede the party trying to accomplish their goal (raising an alarm, getting attacked by a deadly monster, letting their rival gain the upper hand)
By and large the thing that's going to separate your party from suffering the consequences of these threats is going to be time: a resource they have a limited amount of because you're going to arrange circumstances to maximize the drama. You don't need to keep track of individual minutes, more of an abstract sense of "everyone in the party gets to do two things before I mention they hear footsteps approaching the door."
Players are allowed any amount of surface information they'd like and a bit of faffing about on the side, but if they want to get closer to their goal they're going to need to spend time. Some actions are going to cost a flat amount of time, while others (especially those that are up to luck when time is of the essence) are going to require the party to roll. As an example: finding a secret door in a room by noticing the lack of dust on a hidden lever vs. spending ten minutes tossing the room and bruteforcing the solution.
Place a few diversions in their way, whether they be outright red herrings or time sinks that get them something but not the progress they want. (emptying the villain's safe doesn't uncover the secret diary the party is looking for, but it's rewarding in a way other than progress).
You can also be a bastard and put some traps in, not just the type that spring up and deal daamge, but the kind that make threats happen sooner (alarms, surprise guardians) but the kind that introduce new threats (curses, lurking poisonous animals, evidence left behind that alerts their foes)
It's also a good idea to scatter some hints amid the initial setup/diversions to generate those delicious "AHA!" moments and reward players who are paying attention. When someone acts off a hint or guesses the right course of action there's no time cost or roll required. They solved the puzzle, let them move on.
Depending on the scenario you might swap out time with safety, influence, or limited materials as the "resource" being consumed for the sake of the goal.
You can use this method to plan individual escape room style challenges, entire wings of dungeons, or mysteries across towns. All that's required is for your party to know what their goal is and know where to look and you can build out the whole session from there.
#DND #TTRPG Ideas: 1/🧵Elves with antlers. Cool or weird?
Overall I feel like people don't consider the implications.
Do all elves have them
Went on a massive thread bender on Bluesky about the implications of elves with antlers. Turns out you open up a whole can of worms by adding just a simple design choice. - ❤️ Aboleth Eye
Being careful about when you deliver information to your party is one of the most difficult challenges a dungeonmaster may face, a balancing act that we constantly have to tweak as it affects the pacing of our campaigns.
That said, unlike a novel or movie or videogame where the writers can carefully mete out exposition at just the right time, we dungeonmasters have to deal with the fact that at any time (though usually not without prompting) our players are going to want answers about what's ACTUALLY going on, and they're going to take steps to find out.
To that end I'm going to offer up a few solutions to a problem I've seen pop up time and time again, where the heroes have gone to all the trouble to get themselves into a great repository of knowledge and end up rolling what seems like endless knowledge checks to find out what they probably already know. This has been largely inspired by my own experience but may have been influenced by watching what felt like several episodes worth of the critical role gang hitting the books and getting nothing in return.
I've got a whole write up on loredumps, and the best way to dripfeed information to the party, but this post is specifically for the point where a party has gained access to a supposed repository of lore and are then left twiddling their thumbs while the dm decides how much of the metaplot they're going to parcel out.
When the party gets to the library you need to ask yourself: Is the information there to be found?
No, I don't want them to know yet: Welcome them into the library and then save everyone some time by saying that after a few days of searching it’s become obvious the answers they seek aren’t here. Most vitally, you then either need to give them a new lead on where the information might be found, or present the development of another plot thread (new or old) so they can jump on something else without losing momentum.
No, I want them to have to work for it: your players have suddenly given you a free “insert plothook here” opportunity. Send them in whichever direction you like, so long as they have to overcome great challenge to get there. This is technically just kicking the can down the road, but you can use that time to have important plot/character beats happen.
Yes, but I don’t want to give away the whole picture just yet: The great thing about libraries is that they’re full of books, which are written by people, who are famously bad at keeping their facts straight. Today we live in a world of objective or at least peer reviewed information but the facts in any texts your party are going to stumble across are going to be distorted by bias. This gives you the chance to give them the awnsers they want mixed in with a bunch of red herrings and misdirections. ( See the section below for ideas)
Yes, they just need to dig for it: This is the option to pick if you're willing to give your party information upfront while at the same time making it SEEM like they're overcoming the odds . Consider having an encounter, or using my minigame system to represent their efforts at looking for needles in the lithographic haystack. Failure at this system results in one of the previous two options ( mixed information, or the need to go elsewhere), where as success gets them the info dump they so clearly crave.
The Art of obscuring knowledge AKA Plato’s allegory of the cave, but in reverse
One of the handiest tools in learning to deliver the right information at the right time is a sort of “slow release exposition” where you wrap a fragment lore the party vitally needs to know in a coating of irrelevant information, which forces them to conjecture on possibilities and draw their own conclusions. Once they have two or more pieces on the same subject they can begin to compare and contrast, forming an understanding that is merely the shadow of the truth but strong enough to operate off of.
As someone who majored in history let me share some of my favourite ways I’ve had to dig for information, in the hopes that you’ll be able to use it to function your players.
A highly personal record in the relevant information is interpreted through a personal lens to the point where they can only see the information in question
Important information cameos in the background of an unrelated historical account
The information can only be inferred from dry as hell accounts or census information. Cross reference with accounts of major historical events to get a better picture, but everything we need to know has been flattened into datapoints useful to the bureaucracy and needs to be re-extrapolated.
The original work was lost, and we only have this work alluding to it. Bonus points if the existent work is notably parodying the original, or is an attempt to discredit it.
Part of a larger chain of correspondence, referring to something the writers both experienced first hand and so had no reason to describe in detail.
The storage medium (scroll, tablet, arcane data crystal) is damaged in some way, leading to only bits of information being known.
Original witnesses Didn’t have the words to describe the thing or events in question and so used references from their own environment and culture. Alternatively, they had specific words but those have been bastardized by rough translations.
Tremendously based towards a historical figure/ideology/religion to the point that all facts in the piece are questionable. Bonus points if its part of a treatise on an observably untrue fact IE the flatness of earth
Recently I learned a bit of an unspoken truth that I'd brushed up against in my many years of being a dungeonmaster that I'd never seen put into words before: If you want to liven up whatever's going on in your adventure, figure out a way to engage the players in some kind of game. It's simultaneously the best way to provide a roadblock while making your player's victories feel earned.
This might seem redundant, since you're already playing d&d but give a moment of thought to exactly what portions of d&d are gamified. Once you learn your way around the system, it becomes apparent that D&D really only has three modes of play:
Pure roleplay/storytelling, driven by whatever feels best for the narrative. Which is not technically a game, nor should it (IMO) be gamified.
Tactical combat with a robust rules system, the most gamelike aspect.
A mostly light weight skills based system for overcoming challenges that sits between the two in terms of complexity.
The problem is that there's quite a lot of things that happen in d&d that don't fall neatly into these three systems, the best example being exploration which was supposed to be a "pillar" of gameplay but somehow got lost along the way . This is a glaring omission given how much of the core fantasy of the game (not to mention fantasy in general) is the thrill of discovery, contrasted with the rigours of travelling to/through wondrous locations. How empty is it to have your party play out the fantasy of being on a magical odyssey or delving the unknown when you end up handwaving any actual travel because base d&d doesn't provide a satisfying framework for going from A to B besides skillchecks and random encounters (shameless plug for my own exploration system and the dungeon design framework that goes with it).
The secret sauce that's made d&d and other ttrpgs so enduring is how they fuse the dramatic conventions of storytelling with the dynamics of play. The combat system gives weight and risk to those epic confrontations, and because the players can both get good at combat and are at risk of losing it lets them engage with the moment to moment action far more than pure narration or a single skill roll ever could.
I'm not saying that we need to go as in depth as combat for every gamified narrative beat (the more light weight the better IMO) but having a toolbox full of minigames we can draw upon gives us something to fall back on when we're doing our prep, or when we need to improvise. I've found having this arsenal at hand as imortant as my ability to make memorable NPCs on the fly or rework vital plothooks the party would otherwise miss.
What I'd encourage you as a DM to do is to start building a list of light weight setups/minigames for situations you often find yourself encountering: chase scenes, drinking contests, fair games, anything you think would be useful. Either make them yourself or source them from somewhere on the web, pack your DM binder full of them as needed. While not all players are utterly thrilled by combat, everyone likes having some structured game time thrown in there along with the freeform storytelling and jokes about how that one NPC's name sounds like a sex act.
A quick minigame is likewise a great way to give structure to a session when your party ends up taking a shortcut around your prepared material. Oh they didn't take that monster hunter contract in the sewers and instead want to follow up on rumours about a local caravan? The wagon hands are playing a marble game while their boss negotiates with some local mercahnts, offering to let the party play while they wait. The heroes want to sail out to the island dungeon you don't have prepped yet? Well it looks like the navigator has gone on a bit of a bender, and the party not only need to track them down but also piece together where they left the charts from their drunken remembrances as a form of a logic puzzle.
TTRPG Mapmakers might find this interesting! I am working on a D&D campaign set during the tail end of the Greek mythological/Hellenic world, and after combing through all sorts of wikipedia maps and articles I made these maps for my setting! I spent hours in pixlr over the long weekend making these maps of the world! Next is the eastern sea/Troy/Anatolia map for the setting.
I spent so much time using historic references and went down several research spirals to give this setting a mythological-meet-historical foundation. Things obviously aren't accurate to real life, but I think they're neat for the narrative I want to tell.
[Had to delete the previous iteration of this post because I forgot to include a layer of the Greece map, my b! lol]
Premise: The group are heroes and monsters slain long ago, lingering in the underworld. They are given a second chance to prove themselves to the Olympians, emerging from the Underworld near ancient Cumae and eventually sailing eastwards to Olympian-led Greece.
Top is my take on Hellenic Greece; Bottom Left is ancient Cumae and its vassal city-states in Italy, and Bottom Right is a bird's eye view of the regions between ancient Latium and Cumae.
I hope you guys find these maps interesting! Love, Aboleth Eye
You’ve noted your distaste for the alignment system before, and I was wondering what you thought about using Magic the Gathering color identity in place of it. I’ve started using that in my own game and it feels much better
Inspiration Station: Magic the Gathering
TLDR: I really like the color alignment system as it can communicate a lot about a character's moral outlook and general vibe a lot clearer than regular alignment can. I like it so much infract that my drafts blog uses MTG color combinations as a sorting system so I can find things that go together easier. That said, its an extra level of game knowledge for new players to understand/have to do be taught. Alignment is supposed to give new players an idea how their character might act, and it's a lot easler for someone who's never roleplayed before to wrap their minds around acts that are "lawful" or "good" than for them to try to guide their character in a particularly "Blue" direction.
While I'm going to go on a bit of a ramble about this, I'm going to start with an explination of what "Color Identity" is for all the members of my audience that haven't lost years of their lives and chunks of their disposable income to a particular trading card game.
In Magic the Gathering (MtG from hereon out), there are five "elements" of magic that encompas the bredth of existance, all with their own emotional and thematic cores and endless interpretations of what they and their combinations represent.
Anything from creatures to magic to places to civilizations can be found in some combination of these one to five colors, which in turn have relationships with eachother ( harmonizing with their neighbors while conflicting and complimenting with the ones across from them). This makes it a great shorthand from a design perspective, as it links together ideology, iconography, and gameplay into a palate that you can use to paint your characters and settings. There are quite a few "Using the color-pie in d&d" videos on youtube which I encourage you to check out, as they can do a much better job explaining the basics than I could do here.
Advice on how you can use this framework in your own games below the cut:
1: MTG colors as character alignment
If you take a step back and consider the colors not as basic pokemon elements ( wood, water, fire, life, death) but as embodiments of different outlooks and philosophies, the color pie system suddenly becomes a radically efficient tool for summarizing how a character or culture carries out its beliefs, with the understanding that individuals within that culture will mix in new elements or lean away from others depending on their personal predilections. A character who relies on luck and wits (Blue-Red) may be tempted towards story beats that indulge either of their color synergies, but chafe against systems that would deny a part of themselves ( Such as the rule of a Black-White Authoritarian noble or the simplicity of Green-White peasant life).
2: MTG colors as writing tools
The fun in understanding how characters in your story fit into the color wheel isn't only in assigning them a static position, its in testing to see how they evolve and grow when exposed to external stimuli. Will the Blue/Black spymaster veer towards duty to their state (white) or personal power (red), will the righteous Red/White paladin give up their honor for vengeance ( becoming only red) or achieve some level of enlightenment ( white) after suffering through a crisis of faith.
Through the colorpie, and understanding your characters, you can make narrative arcs easy, or at least pencil some interesting questions as you develop the rest of the story.
3: MTG colors as setting design
The different colors have historically been tied to different types of terrain, and while I tend not to do a 1:1 conversion for all of my settings, its very easy to see how thematic throughlines can be made between setting and environment ( yes, necromancers probably would hang out in places full of shadows and rot, but those that embody Black's aspects of ambition and manipulation probably live in settlements infused with some form of social or infestructure decay, or perhaps a dark history concealed just beneath the surface)
To that end, I like to think of small to medium settlements as possessing a dual color identity made up partially of their land and culture, while larger settlements and nations tend to be two or three colors as they are a composite of diverse groups and interests. By looking at these combinations, finding contrasts between them and synergies with outside elements, you can easily begin to set up political and social dynamics: A White/Red/Green kingdom may have contrasting demographics between a warrior nobility ( WR), a traditionalist peasantry ( WG), and nomads who live on the frontier (RG). The kingdom could be threatened by an invading lich (UB) or by an alliance of nomads and peasants who resent the warrior nobility for their conquest generations ago (BRG)
4: MTG colors as game design
Bo yourself a favor and every time you're struggling to make a dungeon, try to figure out what color identity it has. Instantly you've given yourself a massive dose of inspiration for monsters, traps, hazards, and iconography for you to mine simply by visiting the gatherer and scrolling through the visual spoiler. Generally you can do this by thinking about where it was built and by who, with further richness added by thinking about what sort of creatures from the locality have crept in during the meantime and how their color identities harmonize and contrast with the dungeons own.
Likewise, if you're trying to think of abilities/gear to give a player or npc, think about how the different colors play:
White wants to bolster their allies before clashing head on
Blue wants to be tricky until they get in position to outplay their opponent
Black wants to fight dirty until they can really twist the knife
Red wants to go recklessly and blow their opponent away before they can retaliate
Green wants to level the playing field before getting really strong and stomping their foes into the floor
These playstyles ( and their combinations) can guide you in everything from what loot to give your party to the way monsters behave during an encounter: A (GR) barbarian would probably never want to pick up a (u) wizard's staff, but they might be tempted by a (UR) flaming arcane blade that let them expand their usual toolkit by going ethereal. A pack of hungry (BG) ghouls would lurk in the shadows of their crypt until they could ambush their prey, retreating to let their fetid bites weaken the party before sweeping back in with more numbers.
My youngest sibling has a couple overlapping friend groups who have tried to play a few D&D games over Discord, but they've all given up as in-character arguments became out-of-character, or elements of a character backstory or adventure have triggered negative responses from one or more players, and it eventually broke up each game. I love D&D and have wanted to play with my youngest sibling for a while, and have offered several times to DM a few sessions for them and their friends, but they're hesitant as their experiences have been colored by these incidents. So I wanna ask: what advice do you have for keeping tempers cool, keeping IC interactions from harming OOC interactions, and preventing story or character decisions from becoming uncomfortable, offensive, or triggering?
DM Tip: Can't we All just Get Along?
I think there's two elements at play here, the first is whether these people should even be playing as a group to begin with, and the second is a matter of table moderation.
First let's address the former: It's the sad truth of our hobby that not everyone can play together, personalities clash, expectations differ, and sometimes the vibe just isn't there. There's no shame in that, and part of coming into your own as both a player and a DM is realizing what sort of group you'd like to have and taking steps to find one. This is one of the many reasons I don't play in store games, because for me the true magic of the game is only possible when I have the right alchemical balance of players around my table. For me, No D&D is better than bad D&D, so I am exceptionally choosy with what games I do end up playing in and will drop a game the second I determine it isn't for me. I encourage you all to have this exact same mentality, as it will lead to a higher degree of enjoyment to be had by all.
Second, lets talk about fights at the table: It has been a long, long time since I've had anything resembling open player conflict while I was running a game, and I credit that to a decision I made well over a decade ago that I wasn't going to be the sort of DM you heard d&d horror stories about. Instead, I dedicated myself to ensuring that the people around my table were going to have the best time possible, which is the only real metric of success a DM can really have.
To do this, you need to be utterly open and utterly heartless when you sense conflict arising at your table. Someone doing something that makes another player uncomfortable? Quash it, right then and there, and tell everyone why you did it. Person getting overly heated or demanding and bringing everyone down? Call a time out, get some snacks, and talk it through. Player have their feelings hurt? Pause, check in with them emotionally, assure them that it's alright to step away, then continue on.
Like any relationship, a d&d group only works when the participants are invested in eachother's wellbeing, and take that into consideration when determining their own actions. People who don't care about how they affect others are problem players, and problem players need to either be corrected or ejected for the health of the group.
Here's some things you can do at your table to avoid conflict:
Use Safety tools: A lot of people have said it a lot more eloquently than me, but there are lots of resources available to help you and your group manage the stresses that might come up during play.
Writer's room it: when describing what d&d is, I literally always start with "It's a collaborative storytelling game", despite the fact that most people forget about the collaborative part. The campaign isn't just the DM's story to tell, and the players should be given a chance to stretch their authorial power when it comes to deciding what happens. This goes double for moments of conflict, when one of the players feels the actions of another might ruin the story for them. When these sorts of things happen, zoom out, talk to your players about what's going on and what their take on current events is. This change in perspective will often let a player go from feeling that they were personally wronged, to seeing this setback as something they can use to further the story. Do not hesitate to use bribery saying: " if you're ok with your character taking a loss here, something good will happen to you later on." This advice obviously doesn't apply to anything that might violate a player's personal boundaries, which you should simply not let happen.
Say No: D&D, when done right can be one of the most intimate and cathartic experiences imaginable, to the point where it's recognized as a therapeutic tool. On a more casual level, people are there to enjoy themselves and in both instances Players shouldn't have to contend with assholes who get a kick out of ruining their fun. You as the DM are invested with the authority to let things happen/not happen, from whether or not you actually play to whether an action your players decide to take is canonical to how the story proceeds. Don't indulge the asshole, if someone does something that makes people uncomfortable, don't narrate them doing it up until one of the players gets triggered.
Encourage them to be open: everyone at the table needs to be fully up front with how they're feeling, and if one person's not enjoying themselves, you should stop. Players likewise need to be open about their own feelings so as to not get them confused with how the characters might be feeling. It's fine if your characters argue, but only if the players signal that they're cool for that level of antagonism happening in game.
The Bestiary of Aboleth-Eye This is the current home for Aboleth-Eye’s custom and homebrew monsters for D&D 3.5 edition! Everything is still a work in progress, and suggestions are appreciated! Monsters A - Z Auxolotl Auxolotl Swarm Deep Auxolotl Bean Sidhe (Banshee) Roseamar Roseamar Qu...
Hey friends! I’ve been in need of a new homebrew project lately--been fighting creative burnout as best I can. Therefore, I decided to start homebrewing new monsters for D&D 3.5 and sharing them in the following Google Doc!
It’s still pretty sparse because I’ve never worked on monsters before and am still new. Nonetheless, I hope you guys enjoy what I have made!
AND I am taking monster requests!!! If there’s a monster idea YOU would like to see brought to life send it through asks or by joining the Aboleth-Eye Discord here!
Here’s a taste of what’s in the Bestiary:
The Auxolotl -- an underground salamander-aberration whose tails turn metal to gold.
The Bean Sidhe -- the spectral wailing fey/outsiders of Celtic/Irish mythology, remade into a nymph-like creature rather than a template
The Roseamar -- a sentient plant species who viciously patrol forests with thorny whips, all in service to a powerful queen (original credit to @5theditionhomebrewing‘s 5e homebrew)
Virgavis -- the ominous antlered bird of vengeance
Wishing y’all lots of health and love! Send in your requests, I await them eagerly!
