Since the opening days of my RPG life, I’ve created backgrounds for my characters. It’s just how my brain works. I love creating characters and their backstories. Don’t worry, I don’t force my GM (or fellow players) to endure reading the pages and pages of hastily-written material I’ve made for my characters. You shouldn’t do that either. Any backstory of more than a single page will end up in the “TL;DR” pile and will never come into play.

However, I’m not here today to talk about extensive backstories for your characters. I’m here to give some advice to the GMs out there creating adventures for their group. At the start of the adventure, there is a thing called a “story hook” that I’ll be covering in more detail next month.

Two elements of an adventure (or any ongoing campaign) that can help generate quality story hooks are backgrounds and factions. By providing a short list of options that are closely tied to your adventure setting, you can sprinkle hooks throughout the adventure to keep the PCs on track toward the end goal of confronting the adventure’s Boss.

Most of this material may feel like Session Zero goods, but its really not. Yes, backgrounds and faction alliances (and oppositions) should be determined during Session Zero, but they must come into play throughout the adventure. Otherwise, there is no point in including them at all. The key here is to ensure everything drives the adventure forward, deepens the experience for the players, or gives them motivation to be included in the adventure’s premise.

Backgrounds

Backgrounds come in a wide variety of flavors and styles, depending on what game you’re playing. It might be a Fate aspect. It might be a D&D 5e background. It could be a series of die rolls on Cyberpunk 2020’s lifepath system. The list goes on and on and on. I can’t possibly cover all of the distinctions here. If I try, I’ll miss your favorite game’s background system, and then the hate mail will flow in. (Or maybe not; you’re a bunch of nice people.) Instead, I’m going to approach this from a higher-level and more generic angle.

Backgrounds should include hooks into one or more of the following aspects of the adventure. Don’t try to wrap all of these into a single background. Otherwise, it’ll just be too much and will overwhelm the player while they try to keep track of how their background impacts their character.

• Relationship with an NPC
• A different style of relationship with a different NPC
• Alliance with a faction
• Opposition to a faction
• Investment in the story hook
• Creation of a bond with a key location or object

Life is better and creation is easier with examples. Here are a few:

Mentorship – Your character is a mentor to Allela. She is interested in learning from you, is always attentive, and brings you a piece of candy during each of your teaching sessions. (Then, in the story hook, Allela goes missing while on a field trip in the nearby Duldin Forest.) (This creates a relationship with an NPC and the story hook.)

Business Venture – Your character is attempting to get a local merchant guild, The Red Consortium, to invest in an import/export idea that you have. Garlu, the headmaster of the consortium, is reluctant, but will agree to entertain the idea if you do him a favor. (In the hook, the favor requested will be to return a family heirloom that his son lost in the recently discovered ruins in the nearby Duldin Forest.) (This ties the character to a faction, an NPC, a location, and possibly an object.)

Forest Warden – Your character is a member of the Wardens of Duldin Forest. You tend to the forest for Duke Arglist, the local leader of the area, by reducing dangers within the forest and preventing poaching of the duke’s deer. Lately, however, the duke has become concerned with a recent discovery of ruins in the forest. He’s unsure how his royal records and maps never revealed the ruins until its discovery last month. (This ties the character to the duke, a faction, and a location within the forest.)

As you can tell, the ruins within the Duldin Forest are probably going to be key. There is some mystery to the ruins as they were recently discovered. There a few minor hooks here, but they have yet to be fully triggered until the opening few scenes of the adventure. If you can “aim” backgrounds toward the same or similar areas, then hooking the characters (and hopefully the players) into the story will be much easier.

As an addendum, these backgrounds are small elements of a character, not the complete story of the character. Don’t write up a character’s background for the player. Just provide some options for them to pick up and build around while they come up with their own stories about what their characters did before the adventure started.

Factions

As you can see from my examples above, the factions are woven into the backgrounds. In my three examples, I made use of two different factions. You can include all of the factions into the backgrounds if you choose, but keep in mind that some of the factions may be opposition, not allies. This is easy enough to incorporate into backgrounds by simply having a faction do some wrong or misdeed to a character within the background.

Not all factions require background hooks, though. It’s easy enough to keep some aside, or even secret from the PCs, until it’s the right moment to incorporate them. While I’m talking about secret factions, I’m going to advise you to use those sparingly. If every other faction is a “surprise reveal,” then the shock value will wear off very quickly and have the impact of yawns and boredom, not actual surprise.

Most factions should be known to the players, even if they are not attached to or opposed against one another. There are plenty of factions in the real world that have zero impact on my life, but I’m aware that they exist. (I’m mainly thinking of the artificial construct of home owner’s associations here.) I would recommend only creating the factions that will have a direct and tangible impact on the adventure’s story flow. Give each faction a brief description, and create a “faction handout” for the players to peruse and reference. Obviously, if you have a secret faction or two, you’ll want to avoid putting those on the handout.

Some details about factions that I like to come up with are the leaders, organizational structure, goals of the faction, why the faction wants to accomplish those goals, and identifying marks (if any) of the faction. I don’t detail the membership rank and file beyond noting how many members exist within each city, village, or key location. For the identifying marks, I break those into two categories. The first is to note how members are marked. This could be a uniform, badge, secret handshake, a tattoo, or something else to allow either the public or fellow members to know who is in the know. Secondly, how do the faction “mark their territory” to let opposing factions know to stay away or stay out?

Conclusion

I hope this article helps you come up with some quality adventure-related backgrounds and factions to put to use. I touched on story hooks a little in this article, but next month, I’ll be doing a deep dive into story hooks and how to lay them in front of the players with proper bait on the hook.

This time around, I’m going to talk about the order in which you design your adventures. There are many takes on this, and loads of approaches to use. However, I’m going to focus in on what works for me. If it works for you, great! If you give it a try, and it doesn’t quite jive with how your creative processes work, that’s fine too.

As you can tell from the title of the article, I’m going to be talking about adventure design in the order of do the back of the book first, then work toward the front of the book, with one exception. I encourage to know where the story starts at a high level. Determine your location, setting, situation, and any NPCs needed for that opening scene. Don’t setup the story hook just yet. That’ll come later because the hook will point the PCs toward the Boss fight and the final scene.

Opening Scene

Figure out where in the world you want the PCs to start. This can be a village, a city, an outpost, a set of ruins, or some place that has a named marker on your overland map. Then, determine the specifics of where in that location you want the PCs to be when they get the hook. This could be a tavern, a temple, the village square, a row of merchants’ tents, or something similar.

Don’t determine your hook yet. The hook is a pointer to the first stop across many navigation points. You’ll need to determine where the PCs are going to go and what they’re going to face prior to pointing them in a direction. Not having your final location and scene determined is like shouting “ROAD TRIP!” and diving into the car without having a map or a plan. Sure, you might have some fun and adventures, but without that map, you’ll soon wonder where you’re going to end up. That’s not the best plan of action when it comes to planning out an adventure for your players.

The Boss

Figure out who the Big Bad Boss of your adventure is going to be. The world is your oyster, but make sure the Boss reflects that mood, tone, and theme of your adventure. If you’re going for a whimsical, humorous story about unrequited love, the Boss should probably not be an eldritch horror from the depths of the ocean. I mean, that could work, but the bar for success will be set very high.

Once you know who the Boss is, determine what they are trying to accomplish. Does the Boss want to perform a ritual to douse the sun for a full month? Does the Boss just want to open a portal to escape to another realm? Does the Boss want to open a gateway to summon horrific creatures from a far realm into the local area? Does the Boss want to take over a local trade route to make some coin? Perhaps the Boss is a spurned lover of a local NPC, and the Boss just wants to make that NPCs life as miserable as possible.

Whatever they are trying to do, it is paramount to also document why the Boss is trying to accomplish their goals. This motivation will allow you to adjust the Boss’s goals and approaches when the party gets in the way of the goals. A good Boss has a backup plan.

The Lieutenants

Once you know your Boss, go out and create or find appropriate Lieutenants for the adventure. It’s pretty rare that the party will beeline from the opening scene to the final location to confront the Boss. There are going to be obstacles, side treks, mini-quests, and other things to pull the party aside from going straight to the Boss’s lair and putting a good whippin’ on them. This is where the Lieutenants come into play. Depending on the length of your adventure, find some varied Lieutenants for the party to work their way through. A good range of headcount here is 1-3 Lieutenants. You can do more if the adventure is longer of if the party is going to encounter more than one Lieutenant in a single location.

The Underlings

All Bosses and Lieutenants need people to give orders to. Otherwise, they’re not very good at their jobs. This is where Underlings come into play. These people and creatures are generally more numerous and weaker in power than the Boss and Lieutenants that you’ve come up with.

Underlings can be absolutely loyal, completely fanatical, swords for hire, or thoroughly unreliable. They can also be a mix of those attributions, so there might be a chance for the PCs to undermine the Boss’s power structure by hiring away, cajoling into cooperation, or dominating into fleeing some groups of Underlings. Straight combat and slaughter of the Underlings will most likely happen in some encounters, but that gets boring if the Underlings’ sole purpose is to sap the PCs’ resources and hit points.

Final Location and Scene

Once you have your power structure of Boss, Lieutenants, and Underlings in place, you’ll need to figure out where the Boss is going to be encountered and who will be with them when the PCs finally arrive on the scene. This location needs to be discoverable by following a trail of clues, information, and signposts (not literally) that the PCs come across throughout the adventure. They need to be able to clearly traverse from the opening scene to the final location.

Document what the final scene will look like. Where is it? What does the room, set of rooms, complex, or arrangement of buildings look like? What’s the exterior and interior made of? Give some good, potent descriptions here of the setting that support your mood, tone, and theme.

Also figure out what else is going on here beyond “The Boss is waiting for the PCs to show up.” Areas always have activities going on, even when the PCs aren’t present. Figure out what those activities are to make your setting pop and come alive.

Work Back to Front

Have you ever cheated at solving a maze? Yeah. You. I’m looking at you. It seems to me that mazes are more difficult to solve if you start at the entrance and work your way to the exit. However, it just seems to be easier to go from the exit toward the entrance. Maybe it’s just me.

Once you have your final location, setting, and scene established, you can work your “adventure maze” backward toward the opening scene. You know where you are at the end. You should have an idea of what information the PCs need to get to that location. Where can they find that information? Build out that new location with proper setting, Lieutenants, Underlings, mood, tone, and theme.

Now you have a new location that the PCs will need information to get to. Where can they find that information? Hey! Now you have yet another location to detail.

Repeat the above process until you’ve followed the trail from back to front to get to the opening scene.

Set the Hook

The location of interest nearest the opening scene in the order of the story arc needs to be pointed to via information. This is your story hook. This is the first piece of pertinent information the party is going to receive. This is probably the most important piece of information the party is going to receive. If they ignore it, dismiss it, don’t latch onto it, or just plain miss it, then the adventure is dead in the water. You don’t want this to happen.

This means your opening salvo of information needs to be timely, pertinent to the PCs, actionable, achievable, and not too horribly risky at first glance. Once you have momentum in the story, your future bits of information can be helpful in nature, but if you can make each piece of information along the way as vital to the PCs as the opening story hook, all the better.

Up Next!

Next month, I’ll be talking more about backgrounds and factions. These will help you out in creating and setting that initial hook. If you have proper backgrounds and factions in place for the players to incorporate into their characters, then you can even develop multiple hooks for the various backgrounds and factions that all point in the same direction. This will make the start of your game even more potent! More on that next month, though.

When starting to design an adventure for your home group, the first things I always consider are the mood, tone, and theme of the adventure. This will dictate all design decisions, descriptions, monsters included, sometimes the treasure gained, and the general aesthetics of everything I create for the adventure.

Before I jump in, you’ll note that I’m leaving genre out of this list because I’m assuming you already have an established genre for the game you’re running for your group. If you’re working with a “clean slate” (meaning no campaign in flight for this adventure), then you really should determine the genre(s) you’re going to take into account for this adventure. Picking the genre first will drive many of the tropes, assumptions, styles, and approaches for storytelling within the adventure.

Having said all of that, I’m going to delve into mood, tone, and theme, in that order. I truly feel that one leads to the next that leads to the next. I always do them in this order.

Mood

This is the emotional resonance of the adventure. This encompasses the presentation of the material and the feels you want to evoke in your players by way of their characters’ experiences. I highly encourage you to head over to David Hodder’s web site and look at the top “emotion wheel” he has posted there. You’ll start with the innermost level of the wheel and pick an emotion. Then drill toward the outer edges to find more precise emotions.

I recommend having several moods/emotions chosen for your adventure, but make sure they’ll mesh together or have one lead to another. Sometimes, an adventure can present different moods at different stages of the adventure. Perhaps the adventure starts with a village celebration (jubilation) that gets invaded by nearby ravagers (panic) until the party of adventurers restores calm (content). However, during the invasion, the beloved mayor of the village is slain (rage/hate), so the adventurers take it upon themselves to venture into the nearby wilderness to put an end to the ravagers once and for all (stimulated). When they successfully return from their mission (satisfied), the villagers heap glory and accolades upon them (relieved/passion).

Tone

The tone of the adventure is how things are presented to the GM and the players. I’m assuming the GM is you, so you’ll want to make sure your notes, ideas, writings, and concepts reflect the tone you want to present to the players. By approaching your writing of notes with a specific tone in mind, you’ll be more consistent in your presentation of that tone to the players.

Some examples of tones for adventures are:

• Optimistic
• Pessimistic
• Joyful
• Sadness
• Fearful
• Hopeful
• Humorous
• Serious
• Horrific
• Mundane
• Warmongering
• Peaceful
• Weird
• Normal

Theme

The theme of your adventure can, I would argue should, borrow from literary themes. They are well-established, well-researched, and in many places are thoughtfully presented for your education. There are numerous lists of themes on the Internet. A quick search for “story themes” will produce gobs of results. Set a timer for 20-30 minutes before doing any research like this to avoid wasting hours down “the Internet rabbit hole.”

The lists of literary themes are so numerous and lengthy, I’m not going to try and reproduce them here. Instead, I’m giving you the above homework of doing your own research. I just don’t have the space or word count here to even sum up themes that can be applied to adventure creation.

Most of the themes are going to reflect how your PCs interact with the events and situations in your adventure. If you come up with your theme and then design an encounter that doesn’t support or mirror that theme, then the encounter might feel like a waste of time to the PCs. If you can tie every setting, every encounter, most NPCs, and the story arcs to your theme, the adventure will feel more like a cohesive whole rather than random bits tied together with string.

Taking my above example of the ravagers attacking the village during a celebration followed by the PCs tracking down the ravagers in the wilderness and putting an end to them, I would propose that my theme should be something along the lines of “righteous justice.” However, if I shift things around a bit and have the ravagers motivated by their leader’s love for the mayor’s daughter, the theme can change to “unrequited love.” If the daughter loves the leader back, it changes again to “fated love.” If there is no love element in the story arc, but the ravagers are going through a famine and just needed some food the villagers wouldn’t (or couldn’t) sell to the men and women in the wilderness, then you have a “survival” theme. This can be especially true if the famine of the wilderness is creeping toward the village and its farmlands.

The key is to pick a theme to run with, so that it can properly inform and color your story as you put the pieces together.

Changes Over Arcs

I’m also going to add on here that if you have multiple “acts” or “story arcs” within your adventure, you can have a different theme (or mood or tone) for each act of the adventure. I’m mainly working off the assumption that your adventure is a single act, but if it’s longer, then you can definitely have multiple choices going on here. The longer your adventure, the more opportunity you have to explore different aspects of storytelling within your plans.

Stay Tuned!

Next month, I’m going to tackle a concept that I came up with (though it’s probably not unique) called “designing back to front.” I hope you liked this article and stick with me for the next one.

Welcome to a series of adventure design articles that I’m going to publish over the course of the next many months. The idea for this series hit me hard while I was at the bus stop waiting to pick up my man-child. I’d gotten there about twenty minutes early, and the ideas just starting flowing. Like any good writer, I have a notepad and pen in the center console of my car. Within a few minutes, I had the small notepad page filled with ideas. Before I was done, I had most of the following ideas brainstormed and titled.

I also reached out to social media to see if anyone had concepts to add to the list, and an additional idea came in. If more good ideas come in, I might expand upon this series.

The core conceit of this series is to give you bite-sized chunks to chew on and think about as you design adventures for your home game. This might help you in creating adventures for publication as well, but my main target audience is for the home brew GM that is making adventures for their personal group. If there is interest, I might include a wrap-up article from my perspective on how to organize an adventure for publication.

I’ve tried to order the articles in such a way as to allow you to build upon the knowledge step-by-step without getting overwhelmed. As I move through the series, if you think of ideas that I can add to the list or concepts you want me to cover, feel free to comment on the articles. I’ll see what I can do to provide details in those areas for future articles.

For now, I’ll leave you with a teaser list of titles that I’m going to cover with this series of articles. I hope you find them useful and thoughtful.

1. Mood, Tone, and Theme
2. Detailing Back to Front
3. Backgrounds and Factions
4. Story Hooks
5. Thematic Environments
6. Thematic Bosses
7. Thematic Mooks
8. Combo Encounters
9. Maps and PC Handouts
10. Supporting and Opposing NPCs
11. Clues, Rumors, and Connective Tissue
12. Node-Based Design

Last month, I talked about giving your character some goals and motivations to support those goals. During a social media conversation about that article, a friend of mine dropped the idea of writing up an article about villain or antagonist goals and their motivations. Matt Dukes (also a fellow author) is the fellow that gave me the idea for this article, so here we go!

When you’re the GM and you have a BBEG (Big Bad Evil Guy/Gal) opposing the actions of the party, you really need to get into the villain’s head to understand what they are trying to accomplish (goals) and why they are trying to do this (motivations). This will allow you to pivot and change the villain’s approaches when the party partially impedes or fully thwarts the villain’s goals.

Goals

Reference last month’s article for details on short, medium, and long-term goals. My advice there stands for villains as well as PCs. There are some subtle differences, though. Where each party member has the other PCs to lean on while trying to accomplish their personal goals, the villain usually does not. Instead, they’ll have some flavor or organization to support them in their efforts. The villain is typically the leader or a higher-up in the organization, so they can issue orders and commands to further their goals. Make sure to leverage this additional power from the villain’s perspective to hinder the party, make life rougher on them, or to prevent the PCs from getting directly to the BBEG.

Here are some sample organizations that come to mind when building a support structure for the villain:

• Religious cult
• Political party
• Megacorp
• Law enforcement
• Military or mercenary group
• Thieves’ guild
• Mercantile conglomerate
• Craft guild
• Monstrous followers
• Spy organization

Motivations

Considering the motivations behind the villain’s goals will go a long way to structuring your plot points, story arcs, and reactions the villain will have when the party encounters either the villain themselves or the villain’s support structure. Knowing the why behind the need is critical here.

When generating motivations, you can be flexible and more verbose than declaring the goals. You can even apply multiple motivations to a single goal. This will add depth to the character of the BBEG and give you varied approaches at accomplishing the villain’s goal. Don’t get overly complex or clever, though. Also, listen to your players. They’ll postulate and propose amongst themselves about why things are happening. Sometimes, they’ll come up with a better idea than what you had in the first place. You can easily swap in their idea(s) without them knowing. Then, when the villain’s goals and motivations are revealed, the players will feel really smart for having “known it all along.”

Avoid Mustache Twirling

When coming up with antagonist motivations, avoid “mustache twirling.” This is a case of where the BBEG is doing things simply “because they are evil” or “because they are mean” or “because they are cruel” or some such like that. These motivations are entirely unfulfilling for you as the GM and for the players that are trying to oppose the antagonist. Sure, part of the motivation can be evil causes, but typically evil for the sake of evil is very boring. You can do better. I know you can!

Head Fakes

There may be times when the villain sets up a scenario or chain of actions that is a distraction from their true goals. This is kind of a red herring, but can be fun to play through. Don’t do this more than once during a story arc. Also, at the end of the fakery, let the players discover clues or notes or missives that let them in on the fact that the villain (not you as the GM) was faking out the players to delay them or cause them harm. This can set up some real tension and hatred of the villain because the villain “tricked the party” and no one likes being tricked.

Pivoting Actions

The famous quote of, “No plan survives first contact with the enemy,” is so very true in RPGs. No GM plan survives contact with the players. Likewise, no villain’s plan will survive interactions with the party. The villain should be ready for this (if they’re an intelligent antagonist). By delving into the BBEG’s motivations, you can tap them for new ideas for new goals or new approaching at accomplishing the current set of goals. By pivoting the goals, you can keep things fresh and interesting for yourself and the players at your table.

Opposing Goals

If you don’t have goals and motivations for your antagonist before you sit down for session zero, you can leverage the goals that the party gives you as part of their character creation and setting generation process. This is perfectly fine, and probably preferred for building out strong story arcs that will interest your players. If they have their goals, but the antagonist doesn’t care about (or directly oppose), this will lead to many “side quests” as the PCs do their own thing while the antagonist does his thing. Don’t let the party and the BBEG accidentally bump into each other during the course of the story. Put them at odds with one another and amp up the tension and excitement!

Conclusion

I hope this duo of articles has helped you out in firming up how to approach near and distant goals. I also hope that you can see the value of motivations that back and support wanting to accomplish something. These add depth and realism to the goals at hand for both players and the forces that oppose them.

During session zero, the GM is usually hopping on hot (maybe just warm) coals between the various players to answer questions about rules, character creation, setting information, styles/themes/tones for the game, and so on. However, the players will have some idle time as they wait for a question to be answered or as they ponder their character during conceptualization and creation. When I’m a player, one of the things I use this idle time for is to come up with goals for my character. I do this even when the GM doesn’t explicitly ask me for that information.

By having goals that are based on the setting, genre, concepts and general themes of the game, I get a better grasp on who my character was in the past, is right now, and where they want to go. In addition to setting goals, I also attach driving motivations for accomplishing those goals. This brings the goals home for me and makes the goals go even deeper into the character than simply stating something that they want to do.

When setting goals, I come up with at least three goals: short-term, medium-term, long-term. If my creative juices are flowing, I’ll come up with an extra short-term goal as well.

Short-Term Goals

These are goals that are immediate to my character. I try to set them up as goals that will not impact the overall campaign arc or change the world in any way. If they can be resolved within the first three sessions, then that’s an appropriate timeframe for the goal. I also try to formulate them in a way that could lead to larger story arcs down the road.

Here are some examples:

• Find the thief who stole my signet ring because it’s my most prized family heirloom.
• Find out why my sister ran off with the carnival and which way they went because I’m worried about her.
• Figure out where in the world this treasure map scrap that I have leads to because there might be riches there.
• Win at least one good round of gambling at the local gambling hall because I’ve been losing too much gold to <insert antagonistic NPC here>  lately.
• Get a kiss from my beloved despite her parents desires to keep us apart because I’m deeply enamored with them.

Medium-Term Goals

Sometimes the closure of a short-term goal will create a new medium-term goal, but I like to start with one of these in my pocket. This is something that can’t be done or finalized in the first few sessions. These have the potential to lead to longer goals, more serious goals, or can alter the setting in some way.

Here are some examples:

• I want to join a professional guild that supports my character’s interests because having allies and guild members is valuable in all efforts. (Or for the prestige of being called a guild member.)
• The tyrannical baron of the lands I grew up in has promised to marry my little sister to his abusive son, so I want to stop the wedding by disgracing (or killing) the baron or his son.
• I want to follow where the carnival with my little sister went in order to ensure her safety with the carnival. If the carnival is mistreating her, I want to rescue her from the carnival.
• Once I know where my treasure map leads, I want to follow where it leads to find the riches and glory hidden within.

Long-Term Goals

Long-term goals are generally campaign changers. These will also likely impact the world, major NPCs, the story being told, and the party itself. Be careful with setting long-term goals, so that they don’t create intra-party conflict or are diametrically opposed to someone else’s goal. This a good time (again during session zero) to loop some other PCs into the goal setting to see if they can add to, expand upon, or get included in the goal(s) you’re trying to come up with.

These types of goals are most likely the kind that will be resolved near the end of the campaign or near the end of a major story arc.

Here are some examples:

• The king ordered the execution of my innocent father, so I want to commit regicide to end his reign of terror over the nation.
• I want to find Xathaxaxas the Mighty Red Dragon and slaughter him to ensure he will eat no more of my father’s cattle and to gain glory and riches for myself.
• My mother mysteriously vanished into The Dark Faerie Realm when I was a child. I want to venture into the realm and find out what happened to her. My father has been beside himself for decades because of her disappearance, and I want to give him closure.

Motivations

As you can see, all of the above goals have a motivation attached to them. A goal of “kill the king” is one thing, but it’s too nebulous and non-important. However, the addition of “… because the king ordered the execution of my innocent father,” changes things drastically. You need more than just to have a goal in mind. You need to know why your character wants to accomplish something. This is also key information to assist the GM in putting pieces together and getting your goal(s) included in the campaign.

To the GM

When players come to you with goals for their characters, listen up! Pay attention! The players are actively telling you what they want to do, what style of game they want to play, and where they want to go. However, you don’t have to engage with every goal. That way lies darkness and failure. If you can, mesh and merge multiple goals into a single thread. This can be difficult, but if you get three goals about a nefarious, unnamed thief, then you have a single NPC to create to satisfy all three goals. Just make that single NPC the target of those three goals. Done!

Conclusion

I hope this article helps solidify things for you in your mind when it comes to generating interesting backstory elements, finding ways to define your character, and allowing you to delve deeper into the story arcs that are presented by the GM. Lastly, a “secret goal” that is never revealed to the party or the GM is no goal at all. If it’s kept secret the entire time, then it usually can’t impact the game in a satisfying way. Let folks in on the secret, especially the GM, and have some fun with it! (Side note: If, during session zero, the group agrees to “no intra-party secrets” then having a “secret goal” of your own will break that social contract, so don’t do that.)

My group has been steadily playing OSRIC for well over a year now. However, the GM hit some speed bumps in his personal life that required him to take a break. We did some board games and one-shots, but our group is deeply interested in medium-to-long term campaign style play rather than doing one-shots or short forays into a new game. However, we had to find a new game to bring to the table for a longer period of time. This necessitated some research, investigation, experimentation, and frequent changes of systems.

I’ll delve into some reasons about why you might need to changes systems, and then give some guidance on how to shift to a new game with regularity.

Boredom

Perhaps your current system is too simple and boring to play. Maybe it doesn’t have enough knobs, dials, and levers to pull. Perhaps it doesn’t have the right knobs, dials, and levers to allow for character customization, action effectiveness, or storytelling chops. It could also be that the game has a high degree of latency (slowness) in the action economy for each character’s actions. This can lead to most of the table sitting there and staring at a single player while they attempt to decide what to do or to finalize a complex action. Not being engaged with the systems and mechanics baked into a game can certainly lead to a desire to run off and find something new.

Improper Expectations

If you come into a sci-fi game expecting heavy science and near-future Solar System exploration, but it turns out the focus of the game is psychic abilities, alien lifeforms, and intergalactic politics, then maybe it’s not the right game to play. Likewise, a group that is largely into the room-clearing, hack-n-slash style of gaming might be turned off by a modern-day spies and lies kind of game. This can largely be avoided by having conversations between sessions and tackling the “what do what want” kind of questions before even bringing the game to the table. However, there are times when expectations aren’t set quite right, so it’s time to change up systems instead of muddling through with a game that’s not fun for the entire group.

Bad Fit

The game can be a bad fit for you and your group’s play style. This just happens. Maybe you did find that heavy science and Solar System exploration game, but the mechanics don’t click with the group or the presentation of the setting isn’t up to snuff to assist the GM in running the game. This can happen. This is a nebulous category because what is a great fit for one group can easily be a bad fit for another. Often times, this won’t be discovered until you’re 3-5 sessions in. If you make this discovery, hop in the escape pod and jettison from the ship in search of another game.

Too Many House Rules

If you’ve found that the rules are just clunky enough that you have to house rule things to smooth over the rough edges, that’s perfectly fine. I’m not sure I’ve ever been in a non-tournament (or organized play) game that 100% follows the rules as written. Everyone house rules, and this is not a bad thing at all. However, if you’ve discovered that your documented house rules (you document your house rules for later reference, right? RIGHT?!?) runs on for pages and pages and pages, maybe it’s time to step away from that system and find another game system that plays more smoothly or is in better alignment with what you expect from the mechanics of a game.

Real Life Interference / Burnout

Real life can kick anyone in the head at anytime. This happens to our group with some regularity, and we just work around it with scheduling or one-shots or board games. It happens. I also live in Colorado, and we’re entering snow season. This can get in the way of gaming at all or only allow a subset of players to get to the host’s house. Sometimes the real life interference is so deep, troubling, or lengthy in nature that it’s time to pause the current game and move on to something else.

GM burnout is also along these lines. It’s usually caused by non-game stress that impacts the GM’s ability to prepare, think straight, keep things organized at the table, or take on the mental workload of running a session. There are times, however, that the GM simply needs a break from being behind the screen. They need to worry about a single character and that character’s abilities. This is perfectly fine, so long as open lines of honest and compassionate communication are in use.

New Shiny

Hey! We all have games on our shelves and hard drives that we’re dying to get to the table. Some of us have a few. Some of us have a hundred or so. Some of us (looking in the mirror at myself here) have somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand or so. Full disclosure: I have over 5,000 RPG-related PDFs on my hard drive and at least another 30 physical games on shelves. Many of those are untouched or unplayed or have not been played in ages.

I’ve addressed this specific nature of things in Resisting the Shiny.

Easy On Ramp

To make the adjustment between games easier, there are some things you can do to make the on ramp entrance into the new highway smoother and less taxing on your fellow players. All of the following advice assumes you’re either the one running the game or championing the game to be played… or both.

System Mastery and Teaching

Before presenting the game, learn the game. Sometimes this is really hard just by reading the rulebook, but reading the core book is your first step. Maybe you can plop your pet bearded dragon out from under his UV lamp and onto your desk. Teach him the game verbally. You’ll find gaps in your knowledge and rough spots in what you think you know. This rehearsal to the bearded dragon will allow you to make notes and get things more aligned in your brain before teaching it to your gaming group.

Longer Session Zero

A new session will require a longer session zero. In a session zero, I usually like to conclude the session with a meet ‘n’ greet between the characters and some introductory encounter to get their feet wet. Since most everyone will be learning the system and creating characters and learning the setting and talking about expectations with the game and talking about safety within the group (and within the new system) and…. all that other session zero stuff, you’ll either need a few extra hours, or two sessions to get through all of the base stuff. I definitely encourage you to be done with character creation before the end of the primary session zero, though.

Cheat Sheets and GM Screens

To assist with character creation and in-game play, make some cheat sheets for the players and the GM. This will definitely be multiple sheets for each target audience unless the game is super simple. I recommend checking out another article I wrote about creating a custom GM screen. This same techniques apply to creating player cheat sheets.

Don’t Change Lanes Frequently

Lastly, don’t swerve through traffic and mess with things too frequently. This will lead to exhaustion in your group as “all we’re doing is learning new systems and making characters.” You really want to avoid doing this. Get some quality time with each new session (unless it’s immediately evident that the system/setting just won’t work for your group). Discover the ins and outs of each game system and setting you encounter. Explore it. Try to love it. Don’t give up too easily.

The point of playing a game, any game of any style or ruleset, is to be entertained. There’s a saying that goes around: If you’re having fun, you’re doing it right. This is usually in reference to adherence to RAW (Rules As Written). It goes deeper than this, however. Being entertained is more than adhering to (or swaying away from) the rules in the books. Since RPGs are generally a group effort, defining “fun” or “entertaining” can be difficult because of the different backgrounds, perspectives, histories, tastes, styles, and goals of each person at the table. There is hopefully some overlap in tastes, styles, and goals between the players that make up the group, but this can’t be guaranteed. The GM’s viewpoints also need to be taken into consideration. The GM is, after all, a player at the table as well. They just happen to occupy a specialized role during the game play.

Player Types and Motivations

This advice is largely for long-running groups, not games at conferences. However, if you can read the table quickly and well enough to get a grip on your players at a conference game one-shot, go for it! I’m certainly not that astute at identifying player types and motivations while trying to fit a game into a four-hour slot. However, if I have extended time with a group of players, I can usually pin down why they’re at the table and what gives them joy in the game.

There are a plethora of player types at the table, and each one of them has their own goals to obtain entertainment. They also have differing approaches to have fun and accomplish their goals. Robin D. Laws, in his book Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering, outlines seven different player types and details what might motivate those types of players to have fun. The book isn’t expensive, and I recommend picking it up to have a good read.

Adjusting the Presentation

This is something difficult to provide advice for because people are so wildly different. I can’t directly tell you how to approach each individual at your table because I don’t know them. However, I can give some generalities and approaches.

Once you’ve figured out your player types and why they are at your table, you can subtly adjust your presentation, approach, play style, and storytelling methods to keep the wide and varied people at your table entertained and engaged. From my personal experience, figuring out what someone wants from the game is the hard part. Changing things around a bit to provide what they want is the easy part.

However, it’s not 100% easy. By presenting the game to Player A’s target fun area, you might be rubbing Player B the wrong way. This is where trying to find a happy central ground between all of the players (and yourself) can be difficult. I’ve been fortunate that most of the long-term gaming groups I’ve been part of have a solid common ground between the players for me to present the game in the “sweet spot” with ease.

If you’re in a tight spot on “reading the table,” then maybe some out-of-game conversations are needed. You can simply ask the players what they want and why they want it. Granted, some players may not be introspective enough to give a solid answer. If someone says, “I just want to have fun,” that’s not going to be helpful. Ask them what they enjoy about the game, the group, the genre, the system, their character, and so on. Find out if backstabbing monsters is their key source of joy. Find out if seducing nobles is where they have fun. Find out if solving puzzles, riddles, or mysteries is their go to for enjoyment. The list of what they might want and why they might want it is as large as humanity itself.

If you do need to interview your players, keep an open mind. What you mind find boring (e.g.: adding up large numbers of dice) might really give one of your players a pleasing sense of accomplishment. What you find detestable (e.g.: managing the economy of running a business or mercenary company) might give the “spreadsheet guru” in your group something to get all sorts of excited about.

(Full disclosure: I love numbers and adding up dice. I’m also the “spreadsheet guru” in my group and love tracking business/mercenary evolutions in my spreadsheets.)

Emotional Beats

Having fun, laughing, smiling, and generally enjoying an experience is an emotional one. This doesn’t mean that every time a character is slapped with an emotion that it has to be a “happy” one. If every experience has to be “happy,” then genres like thrillers, horror, some mysteries, tragedies, and some dramas would not be as popular as they are. However, experiencing something in those veins can be an enjoyable experience. One of the things I struggle with in my writing of a first draft of my novels is “hitting the feels.” That always comes along during the editorial passes that I do on my novels before anyone else sees them.

Don’t be afraid to hit your characters in the feels. Some of these emotional beats will bleed through to the players, and give them feels as well. When doing this, it’s vitally important to make sure you’re involving safety tools, adhering to pre-stated lines and veils, and not going places that your players would not want to go with their emotions. If a player just had a parent die in real life, veer away from parental (or even familial) death for a long while. Just be cognizant and aware of what your players would want and definitely would not want in their emotional beats.

Conclusion

I’ve barely scratched the surface of what could and should be done for increasing the entertainment value of your gaming sessions. There’s loads of deep psychology going on here, and I’ve never taken a class or done much layperson study of that topic. However, I’ve been running and playing tabletop role playing games for enough decades (four of them!) that I have a good feel for this. Having fun is the goal. If you’re doing that, you’re doing it right.

As gamers we live with our characters. Some players only inhabit those fictional lives during game sessions. Others write up extensive backstories during downtimes. Others will journal as the character or write fictional stories featuring their characters. For some, a character is simply a collection of numbers on a character sheet. All of these approaches are valid and acceptable, even within the same gaming group.

Regardless of how much time and love and care and passion we pour into our particular characters, there comes a time when the character has reached a point where retiring the character is an appropriate thing to do. There are several causes that I’ll talk about in a moment that can lead to the retirement of a character. There are also a few ways to retire the character as well. Simply “stopping playing” the character can work, but there are more elegant exit strategies.

Not The Right Character

You’ve made your character, but it doesn’t gel with the themes, story elements, setting, other party members, or the approach of gaming the GM is presenting. This means you have the wrong character to play for full enjoyment of the game. If the game is a one-shot, this is less problematic, but if the game is a long-running campaign, this can be a complete bummer.

As we gnomes have talked about in various articles and Gnomecasts, having a proper session zero where the GM collaborates with (or presents to) the players to determine the various aspects of the game can alleviate or eliminate building the wrong character. Collaborating with the rest of the players is also vital here to ensure you aren’t going to step on toes when it comes to sharing the spotlight.

However, if you end up with just the wrong character for the campaign, then it might be time to shelve the character. The earlier you do this, the better off everyone will be with the game, especially the GM. If you can find an exit for your character before the GM attaches too many plot points to it, then this will cause less pain for the GM.

No Joy Anymore

Perhaps you have a character that you love (or once loved) to play, but the joy of playing the character has waned. This can come from many different angles and have quite a few different root causes. If you’ve done the proper introspection into your past love for the current character, but you’ve solidly landed in the camp of “I don’t like doing this anymore with this character,” then it’s time to move on to a fresh character.

No Challenges

Some campaigns get to the point where the characters are extraordinarily powerful. This is actually where I’m at right now as a player in the current campaign. All of us are supremely powerful and potent, and this is presenting issues to the GM for giving us proper challenges at the table. Things are improving in the game, though. I noticed in the past couple of sessions that the GM threw more difficult challenges and quests in front of us. This amping up of the challenge levels in the game has brought new joy (and good tension) to the game.

If you and/or your group of players notice that you’re not being challenged by events, encounters, situations, environments, or other interactions, then it’s time to have a chat with the GM. Be nice. Be courteous. The GM is probably doing their best, but maybe hasn’t quite realized that you’re getting bored with the challenges. Ask them to turn up the dial on the difficulties of future encounters, but make sure you don’t throw down the gauntlet of challenge. Doing that can almost ensure that the GM’s response will be to turn the difficulty up too high for your group.

No More Goals

If the campaign has played out and the Ultimate Goal Of The Story has been resolved, this might very well be a perfect time to retire the character(s) and step toward the next story. Perhaps your personal goals for your specific character have been resolved. If you don’t see any new goals, then try to assist other party members with their goals. If this list runs dry, and the GM isn’t presenting new quests, then you might be seeing signs that it’s time to retire the character.

Single Character Retirement

If any of the above reasons (or other reasons) are pushing you toward retiring your character, have an open and honest conversation with the GM and the rest of the players on how you want to handle it. Perhaps you want to ride off into the sunset and become a legend of the local areas. Your character can also stay in the region and become a patron of new adventurers. Don’t forget about the heroic death option, but make sure you’re playing a system or telling stories in the proper manner to make your character’s death epic and truly worthy of stories to be told for the ages. It’s also possible that the character can retire to a mundane, safe, and somewhat boring profession. Barkeeps and innkeepers tend to be popular tropes for retired characters, and these work quite well.

You can also have your character become an NPC for the GM to run. I highly recommend avoiding making the former party member into a nemesis for the remaining group. This type of betrayal rarely makes sense in the story, and can lead to hard feelings at the player level. I’ve seen this happen a handful of times throughout my decades of gaming, and it only turned out well once.

Whole Group Retirement

If everyone is on board with the same feelings of moving away from the current group of characters, then maybe it’s time to retire the entire party. Of course, you’ll want to include your GM in this conversation. If you give the GM enough heads up, they might be able to adjust their plans for the game to conclude the current story arc(s) in a satisfying manner. If the entire group retires, then each character has the same options I outlined above for retirement.

Doesn’t Kill The Campaign

Having a single character retire doesn’t need to trigger the death of a campaign. There are still other characters in the party that can carry on the story. Of course, if the entire group retires, this is another matter. To ensure the story continues in a smooth and streamlined manner, make sure you don’t ambush your group with a sudden character retirement. If you’re having feelings that you need a fresh character in the campaign, then those feelings have most likely been building for a while. It’s no surprise to you, so it shouldn’t be a surprise to everyone else.

Bringing In A Replacement

Once you’ve successfully retired a character, you’ll want a new one to come into the storyline and campaign. I strongly recommend that the new character come in at a power level equivalent to the remaining characters. Don’t punish a player with a “first level character” because they are starting over. This is punishing the player because they’ve made a decision that will enable them to have more fun.

Conversing about what kind of character to bring in while the campaign is mid-stream is even more vital than talking about character builds during session zero. There are storylines in flight. There are character arcs flowing. There are enemies, friends, allies, factions, and so much more attached to the group that weren’t there at the start of session zero. The new character will change and adjust things. That’s unavoidable. However, the new character should not be a majorly disruptive force in the course of the game.

You Look Like A Trustworthy Fellow

When introducing the new character to the group, it’s best done on neutral or friendly grounds. Finding a warrior roaming a random dungeon and then immediately inviting them into the group is fairly strange and weird. Yes, you can make this work, and it might be necessary. If the old character was “retired by heroic death” in the depths of a dungeon, then you don’t want the player to sit idle at the table while the party makes their way back to a friendly location to meet their new party member. A good approach here is to have the party discover the new character already in action and battling a known enemy. This can set up the fact that the new character is nominally on the same side as the party. A solid trope is to also have the new character be a prisoner of the Bad Guys in need of rescue (just make sure the new character’s gear is stash somewhere nearby).

If situations allow, though, I do recommend having the new character be a known factor in the world that is aligned with the party. This can be via familial relations, faction ties, friend-of-a-friend, strong rumors, legends and lore, or some other flavor of alliance. This can establish that the new character is friendly, supportive, and reliable to the rest of the party.

There are quite a few world building articles (and podcasts) on Gnome Stew. Heck, I’ve even written one. However, that’s not the point of this article. I’m not going to talk about tectonic plates, rivers, mountains, trees, natural and political boundaries, and so on that make up some of the elements that go into building a world. Instead, I’m going to zoom into a defined and limited geographic area and talk about creating a setting within that area.

Genre Selection

If you’re creating a setting, I’m going to assume it’s for a game you’re about to run or a campaign that is underway. Either way, you should have the genre determined for the game/campaign. This means you’ll know the genre you’re setting is going to reflect. Dropping a neon sign in the middle of a remote halfling village probably won’t match the theme, style, or tone of a fantasy setting. Sure, there can be exceptions to this if you’re mashing up genres. Do whatever is appropriate for the genre(s) of your game, but make sure the choices are thought out in advance to not break the tone or tropes of the genre you’re representing at the table.

The Area First

Determine the physical size of the setting that will contain your game. This can range from a single building or grow to be a sprawling complex of buildings. It could be a small village, a neighborhood in a large city, the large city itself, a region containing many settlements, a nation, a continent, a world, and so on. In some science fiction settings, you might even get to multiple planets, a star system, a local cluster, a galaxy, or the universe itself. However, I would argue that each settlement, nation, world, planet, etc. can be broken down into its own setting.

I would recommend thinking small and immediate as opposed to bloated and wide-ranging. Handle what your PCs are going to encounter in the immediate few sessions and grow out from there. The trick to “grow in the right direction” as the PCs expand their horizons, so you’re a step or two ahead of them in creating new settings.

If the “world” that you’re in is a metropolis for its time, then I would start with the immediate neighborhood for the initial adventure or two. Give the party gobs of reasons to stay put in their neighborhood and some motivation to stay away from “those other areas” of the city. Basically, keep the clues, NPCs, villains, action points, and encounters centered around and important to the neighborhood. Make sure the plans you have are tight-knit and attached to the neighborhood, so that if the party wants to explore outside the neighborhood, you’ll let them know that it will take time to get there and back and do whatever it was they wanted to do across town. If you have a timer going, this will consume some of that timer until Something Bad Happens. That should be ample motivation to keep the party attached to the local area.

Styles, Themes, and Tone

Step one: Set a timer for twenty minutes.

Step two: Head on over to TV Tropes.

Step three: Plug your genre into the search bar at the top.

Step four: Start reading and clicking and absorbing what you don’t already know about what builds the styles, themes, and tones for your genre and setting.

Step five: When the timer goes off, STOP. Close the tab(s) you have open.

Step six: Let what you’ve read rest. Give it time to percolate on your own. You’ll be amazed at the ideas that will bubble to the top over the course of some time. If you have to do something, make it a low mental effort. Something like a shower, doing the dishes, vacuuming, or walking the dog. You’ll be amazed at what the seeds of information from TV Tropes will do for your idea growth.

Governments

What governmental entities control or influence the area for your setting? How strong or weak is that influence? Are your PCs aligned with or against the various governments? In most RPGs, we tend to lean into a monolithic government, but this is rarely true to reality. Granted, we don’t want to get as convoluted as reality because that way lies madness. However, you can represent various controls (or granted freedoms) at the national, state, county, city, and HOA levels in a modern setting. There is plenty of give and take there between all of these entities.

You don’t need to go into deep detail about the five levels of government that I listed above. Just hit the immediate needs that touch upon the game. Also, it doesn’t hurt to make up weird laws/rules that the PCs may or may not be aware of that can alter the story being told. True story: I’ve had a friend almost fined into the poor house because the head HOA person didn’t think the paint on his house was “fresh enough and too faded.” Strange, eh?

I’m also going to put police and military under the government umbrella because these organizations are typically created by, controlled by, and ruled by the government at different levels. Don’t forget to include some level of law enforcement in your setting because for as long as humanity has had laws there have been people tasked with the enforcement of those laws.

Companies/Unions/Guilds

Governments aren’t the only official structures that can control or influence an area. There are plenty of opportunities to create companies, megacorps, unions, guilds, and other organizations (see the HOA mentioned above) that the party can run into, bounce off of, become enemies with, befriend, or work for. These are a type a faction, but I have them listed out separately because they generally operate with some level of blessing or approval or licensing from the government.

Depending on your setting and genre, the list of companies, unions, and guilds can be wild and varied. Like with establishing the area, think of your genre and how you implement these aspects of a setting. Everything here should be in support of the themes you’re using. Having a megacorp buy up all of the farmland in a rural, fantasy setting is probably not going to happen. However, the nation’s leader could easily invoke some sort of divine right or imminent domain ruling to come in and claim all of the farmlands for himself or herself in a fantasy setting. If you jump to a cyberpunk setting, my two examples above would easily flip places. In other words, megacorps would be the true sources of power while the national leader would most likely be impotent or weak.

Religions

Religious organizations can influence a setting as well. If you have an area that is monotheistic in nature or a strong theocracy, then the higher power of the religion is going to have a strong grip on what does and doesn’t happen in plain sight or in public spaces. If you have a polytheistic set of religions, then each individual higher power is going to have varying degrees of control over how people act. At an extreme (especially in a fantasy setting where diving power is real and tangible), there may even be a governmental restriction (or ban) on religion as a whole.

Factions

Factions tend to interact with the setting in a manner similar to companies, but typically outside any government regulation or control. As a matter of fact, some factions are going to be illegal in some manner. Factions range from minor amounts of influence to international control of massive business (or financial) ventures. Not all factions are bent on global dominance. Honestly, most factions in most settings are going to be focused on the “core setting” and maybe the immediately surrounding areas.

A short list of factions includes:

• Political parties
• Youth groups (think scouts)
• Social Activists (legal and otherwise)
• Gangs
• Organized Crime
• Brotherhoods and Sisterhoods (Masonic lodges, VFW, Elk lodges, etc.)
• Fraternities/Sororities
• School clubs

Independent NPCs

Down near the bottom of the “influence ladder” that I’ve been building thus far are important or independent NPCs. Look at everything you’ve developed above and try to find small nooks and crannies left behind where NPCs can be slipped in like cement between the larger stones. This is where you’ll find your powerful or independent NPCs. They’ll be there to provide services, tasks, missions, quests, support, advice, or even opposition to the party.

Missions/Objectives/Quests

What jobs are there to do in the setting? Who is giving out those jobs? Why are they giving out the jobs instead of doing the task themselves? What is the objective of the job itself? What are they paying? What are the risks? What are the rewards? What personal ties do the PCs have to the job? What organizational entities (from above in this article) are allied with the party during the job? What entities are opposed to the party? What entities just don’t care if the PCs succeed or fail?

There are definitely more questions you can ask yourself about each job that you present to your party. The important part is that the job needs to originate in the setting and conclude in the setting. It’s best if the entire job occurs within the setting you’ve built, but this is not a requirement. If you send your PCs off into the unknown parts of the map, be prepared to have some settings ready to go to fill in those blank parts of the map.

Weaving in the PCs

I’m leaving the most important part for last. Once you have the above built, it’s time to present a brief set of information (2-3 pages) to the players in a quick-read format. This should present to them the government style, active religions, major organizations, important factions, well-known NPCs, and so on.

Once your players have read this information (and don’t count on all of your players reading everything, sorry), you can ask them to build out a background with hooks during session zero. One hook should place them in alignment with at least one organization. They should also have an optional hook that puts them in opposition with at least one organization. Another hook can have them be in some sort of relationship with an independent NPC. This relationship doesn’t need to be romantic or even friendly, but they need to know each other. Lastly, there needs to be some intra-party hooks between the characters. However, this is typically outside the setting building, but it can be influenced by the setting quite a bit.

Conclusion

I hope this information helps you build stronger and more three-dimensional settings for your games. Obviously, there are many other aspects of settings that I have not touched on here. What are some of your favorite ways to approach building out a setting? What aspects or angles do you include in that building process? I’d like to hear from you.