The Gamemaster Pipeline

One of the universal truths of roleplaying games is that players outnumber gamemasters by a significant margin. And one of the universal problems of RPGs is that players outnumber GMs by a significant margin — because without a GM, there’s no game to play.

An aside — I absolutely know that there are many amazing RPGs that don’t require a GM in the traditional sense of the baseline GM-plus-players setup that D&D invented. (One of those games — En Garde! — is almost as old as D&D!) But for the purposes of this discussion, most of us live in a world where no matter what our game of choice, if we’re players, we need a GM.

Eddie Munson, Gamemaster extraordinaire, from “Stranger Things"

I don’t know how ubiquitous this experience was for gamers of my generation, but back in the day and among the group of friends I played with, everybody was a GM. We all started as players in campaigns run by the two friends who had learned the game as players in other campaigns, but it took no time at all for us to start running our own games — because we all understood pretty instinctively that running games was an incalculable amount of fun.

It was also the case back in the day that it felt relatively easy to get players to try their hand at running even a one-off game or two because being a GM felt like the best way to understand the game. If you loved the game, if you enjoyed the experience of embracing the rules of the game, then why not explore those rules to the absolute maximum?

Regardless of my own experience, though, I get that a lot of players perceive stepping up to be a GM as a daunting task. And to be fair, those players aren’t wrong. It’s definitely more work being a GM building a narrative framework for the game and running a limitless crowd of NPCs and monsters than it is to simply focus on a single backstory and a single character. For me, though, all the things that make playing a single character fun are amplified a thousandfold in the experience of running games. 

So as experienced GMs, how do we express that idea to players? What can we do to show off the fun of running games and building worlds to those still waiting to take the first steps toward sitting on the other side of the screen or the map, then saying, “So what do you…?”

Finding Likely Players

In the games we run as GMs, we can easily set out to give players a small taste of what it’s like to do what we do. But as the first step of this process, we need to figure out which players are most interested in becoming a GM. In the best-case scenario, you’ll have a player who actually expresses that interest. But if not, keep an eye out for players already expressing a natural interest in some of the things a good GM does. 

Do you have a player who loves digging into the rules? Maybe even a player you make use of to remember rules details when you don’t? That’s an amazing candidate to take on the role of GM. How about a player who loves not just building a backstory for their character, but adapting that backstory to better fit the story of the campaign and the backstories of the other characters as the game progresses? That’s potentially someone with the interest in building shared narrative that’s a core strength of a good GM.

Moving Multiple Pieces in Combat

Once you’ve got players with whom you want to share a bit of what it feels like to run a game, think about asking those players to test out an essential GM skill by running multiple creatures in combat. In any scenario where one or more NPCs lends the party a hand in a fight, give the players those NPCs’ stat blocks and ask them to direct those characters tactically and narratively. Or if your party has a spellcaster who’s prone to summoning multiple creatures, getting multiple players to take the responsibility for those creatures out of your hands is a great way to lighten your load as a GM — even as it gives players a chance to develop a knack for thinking in parallel during combat.

Invitation to Improvisation

Outside of combat, a GM’s greatest skill is probably the ability to improvise — and improvisation is a great thing to have players take on from time to time in a campaign. For a lot of GMs, getting players to help with the improv nature of world-building in a game is a kind of Holy Grail. When asking players to engage with the game that way, though, keep in mind that improvisation is always easiest within a framework of possibilities. For GMs, that framework is our sense of all the things we know about the story that the players and characters don’t. But because the players don’t have access to that framework, we need to create one for them by establishing bounds on the kind and degree of improvisation we ask for. 

Here's an easy (and classic) example. The characters are entering a new town or neighborhood, and looking to find a tavern to ask around for information. Normally, you’d come up the name of the tavern, decide what it looks like, and provide details for the NPC the characters need to meet. For you, that’s probably easy, because as a GM, you have enough sense of the scene and the world around it to narrow down specific options from a broad range of possibilities. But if you ask the players to come up with the name of that tavern and the NPC, the broad range of possibilities might feel overwhelming in the moment. So instead, provide a name for the tavern and ask the players what kind of place it sounds like based on that name. Describe an NPC and ask the players what that NPC’s name is based on their appearance — or vice versa.

Likewise, whenever the characters are in a town or city that one of them knows well, ask the player what some of their characters’ favorite places in that settlement are. Anyone playing an RPG has the requisite imagination to easily come up with answers to all these questions and more — but giving the players a specific focus can help keep them from being overwhelmed by not knowing where to start. 

Magical Fun

Custom mechanical design — of encounter areas, environments, traps, hazards, magic, and more — is one of the biggest jobs of a GM. And although many of those things are outside the scope of what players can be reasonably asked to contribute to a game, there’s one bit of mechanical design that many players gravitate toward all on their own — magic items. To get a would-be GM’s creativity flowing, feel free to ask players not just for their wish lists of stock magic items (as many GMs do). Ask them to design a magic item they’d like their character to have, within any general creative boundaries you establish (including item rarity appropriate for the character’s level). For potentially more interesting results, ask each player in your group to design a custom magic item for another player’s character. 

Designing magic is something that it’s surprisingly easy to get players into — even those who profess they don’t have any real interest in digging into the nuts and bolts of the game. And each player who discovers how much fun it is to tinker with the wider world of the game is a potential GM in the making.

The Lone and Level Sands

I’ve had desert exploration on my mind recently, both as a result of my current campaign and a recent editing project, which has inspired a collection of random desert encounters. These encounter setups are organized around multiple possible throughlines (a topic I talked about not long ago), and are a follow-up to a selection of nautical encounter setups.

These encounter ideas work for characters traveling through desert, badlands, scrubland, or other remote locales. They can be used as random encounters, as the setup for a series of encounters you build out from these initial ideas, or as an initial-encounter hook for an even larger adventure.

(As an aside, the title of this piece is taken from the Percy Bysshe Shelley poem “Ozymandias,” which ties to the recent editing project mentioned above — the new book from Mike “Sly Flourish” Shea. You can find a teaser here.)

Art from the 4e Dark Sun Campaign Setting

The Empty Village

While crossing uninhabited badlands in pursuit of a villain they’ve promised to capture alive, the characters come across a ruined village abandoned decades before. The site might now mark the territory of a clan of basilisks who petrified the villain, and who the characters must defeat so they can claim the villain’s statue form, then restore it. Alternatively, the site might be subject to a terrible curse that destroyed its original inhabitants and the villain alike — and which has trapped the spirits of some of the lost into scattered gemstones from which they might be returned to life.

Shelter from the Storm

An advancing sandstorm sees the characters forced to quickly seek shelter in a series of caverns accessed through a crumbling stone bluff. But as they explore the cave complex, they realize that they aren’t the only ones seeking shelter there. The other group might be a party of desert raiders who use the caves as a secret hiding place to lie low after attacks on trade caravans, and who are willing to kill to keep its location a secret. Or they might be spectral undead spawned from long-dead travelers who tried to wait out a storm centuries past and were killed when rising dunes sealed them inside — and who the characters can convince to stand down in exchange for finding, then properly interring their remains.

Unusual Oasis

Characters traveling through the desert spot an oasis appearing on no known maps, with humanoid figures seen on the outskirts, beckoning frantically. The inhabitants of the oasis might be a noble’s hunting party who became lost during a storm, and who promise a rich reward if the characters return them to their home city. The oasis might be the headquarters of a gang of brigands, who manage to keep the site a secret by drawing in, robbing, then killing every traveller who passes by. Or the site might be unknown because it marks the lair of an elder water elemental recently spawned from an ancient underground aquifer — and who has taken a local nomadic tribe hostage, forcing them to worship the elemental as a god.

Mirage Arcana

A dry lakebed is well known as a site for mirages, but characters exploring the area discover that some of those mirages are magical illusions concealing a crumbling fortress. The site might be home to a friendly master illusionist who loves their solitude, and who is happy to hire adventurers to run errands for them. Or the fortress might be intentionally concealed by teams of spellcasters working for a powerful warlord, who plans to use the hidden site as a staging ground for attacks against nearby settlements.

Lost Merchant

While traveling a well-established trade route through the desert, the characters catch up to a lone merchant pulling a handcart, who claims to have become separated from a larger caravan that came under bandit attack. The merchant might secretly be a merchant lord, desperate for an escort to the nearest settlement and willing to reward the characters with treasure and adventure hooks. They might be a good rakshasa in disguise, looking for selfless heroes to undertake a dangerous mission. Or the merchant might be possessed by the spirit of an ancient sorcerer entombed nearby as a penance for their evil deeds, and who hopes to convince the characters to break the seal on the sorcerer’s tomb and restore them to power.

Carnival of Shadows

While enjoying a seasonal carnival in a scrubland town, the characters are caught in the middle of a skirmish between members of two rival bandit gangs violating the carnival truce. It might be the case that one of the gangs is attempting to assimilate the other, threatening to plunge the whole settlement into violence unless the characters intervene. It could be that a wandering assassin is set to fulfil a contract on a powerful figure in the town, and set off the gang violence as a distraction. Or the violence might be the result of a fell magical relic recently brought into town by an unknowing treasure hunter, its spreading magic turning folk violent and threatening to turn the carnival into a bloodbath.

Getting Away From It All

Like speak with dead and a number of other spells that are foundational to the D&D game, the teleport spell is one that can inspire great consternation in some DMs for its ability to derail a well-thought-out encounter — or even upend a whole campaign. Whenever group teleportation first becomes a thing a party can do, we as GMs need to always keep that in the back of our minds, fretting constantly over when and how the party’s arcanist will play the “Get Out of This Encounter Free” card. 

Except that a lot of GMs (including me, once upon a time) can easily forget that what the teleport spell actually does and what a gang of overly excited players assume the spell does aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Art from the Dungeon Master’s Guide

The Fine Print

It’s easy to assume that teleport allows a group of characters with access to that spell to safely and instantaneously travel wherever they want. But that’s not actually what the spell says. What the stock 5e version of the spell says is: “The destination you choose must be known to you, and it must be on the same plane of existence as you. Your familiarity with the destination determines whether you arrive there successfully.”

That “known to you” clause makes teleport a much more interesting spell from a GM’s perspective. Because the actual mechanics of what “known to you” means (as laid out in the table that accompanies the spell) can add a lot to the narrative of using the spell.

Teleport absolutely gives the players an almost foolproof get-out-of-danger-now move (but see below for how that “almost” might play out against savvy foes). In the midst of a knockdown battle, characters who can coordinate regrouping with the wizard’s casting of teleport can flee a fight they can’t win or that they don’t want to finish. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. A bit of general wisdom that’s useful for all GMs is to ensure that battles have exit points that characters and their foes can take if they want or need to. Not every battle needs to be a fight to the finish, and teleport simply gives the characters and players an additional out if they want it.

Likewise, teleport allows characters to go back to any specific location they’ve been to before, which can make for fast side treks. If it turns out that talking with the sage the party met three levels earlier might help with cracking a puzzle or deciphering coded lore, it’s totally fine to just let that happen. By the time the characters are of a level where a party member is casting teleport, it’s expected that they can get access to all kinds of exceptional resources, so don’t worry about them gaining long-distance access to resources they’ve already used.

For everything else, though? Using teleport can be much trickier than the players and characters initially expect.

Who’s Got the Map?

One thing to keep in mind is that teleport takes its caster and any friends tagging along to a specific location. Not to a city in general, but to a particular street corner in that city. Not to a random spot in a dungeon or a castle, but to a particular room in such a site. Characters who’ve heard of the most magnificent city in your campaign world or the richest hidden vaults but who have never visited those sites have zero chance to teleport there. And that’s where teleportation can make an adventure interesting.

Teleporting to a site the characters don’t know requires tracking down a description of that site. That’s a side quest right there, which you can have as much fun with as you like. The end of such a side quest should unveil the lore describing a location in very specific detail, most commonly in the form of written or illustrated records, or by talking to an NPC who’s been at that location and can describe it. But the characters’ goal of getting to their magical destination doesn’t necessarily end there.

Go Left… I Mean Right

Characters who seek a description of a location with the intent of teleporting there are always working with the very optimistic hope that that description is accurate. But whether that’s the case or not is known only to you. A written account or sketch of a specific site might miss out on a number of key details. A retired warrior who once fought a battle out in front of the Lost Shrine of Unfindability might have only hazy memories of the place now, though they swear their recollection is crystal clear when the characters offer to pay for it. A popular tavern that can be described with perfect accuracy by anyone who’s spent time there might have burned down when the characters decide to drop in from the other side of the continent.

The Off Target result on the table for the teleport spell gives you a degree of carte blanche for deciding where the characters end up. This can provide a perfect excuse to bust out a premade random encounter using a map you’ve previously selected for just this purpose, as the characters arrive in middle-of-nowhere monster territory rather than their intended destination. But the Similar Area result on the teleport spell’s table can be even more fun. Are the characters trying to teleport into the common room of the merchants’ guild to pull off a daring heist? Maybe the ex-guild member who described the site was fired for drinking on the job, and their shoddy description sees the characters end up in the common room of the assassin’s guild two blocks over instead.

Also, don’t forget that the best-known locations the characters might attempt to teleport to in settlements, fortresses, or dungeons are often the busiest and most populated locations. It might be an automatic success for the bard to teleport the party to a public market they know well in a previously visited city. But the bard might need to then turn on the charm to explain why the characters have just appeared in the middle of a panicking merchant’s stall before the local guards are called.

You Shall Not Pass

One thing that’s always easy for a GM to forget is that just as you have to worry about the effects that powerful magic can have in the campaign, your villains also spend a lot of time worrying about that. As such, powerful figures and monsters who are painfully aware of the hassle that a group of characters teleporting into their sanctum would cause will absolutely set up defenses to protect against that if they can. 

Formidable wizards or priests channeling peak divine power might have their towers or temples protected by unique magical effects that negate or interfere with teleportation, both incoming and outgoing. If a local cavern is suffused with natural magic that causes teleportation to automatically go off target, it’s a safe bet that some intelligent apex monster will have decided that’s a premium spot for a lair.

On a less epic level, having a lair or sanctum protected by the glyph of warding spell or similar effects won’t prevent characters from teleporting straight in, but will provide them with a most unpleasant welcome. And even the most low-level illusion magic filling a location with false features can hinder attempts to teleport there after viewing that location with scrying or similar magic.

Final Destination

One important note: Don’t treat any of the ideas here as punitive or retaliatory. Your intent should never be to punish the characters because their relentless pursuit of experience lets them learn to do new cool stuff. But as is often said, the destination should never be the point of any journey. Teleportation in the game can and should give the characters access to a wider world. But you as the GM can still have fun with how they get there.

Down by the Seaside

Inspired by some seafaring adventuring in the earlier sessions of my current campaign, and by some writing on a project that cannot yet be named, I was thinking recently about random encounters with a nautical theme. And because I talked not long ago about always setting up encounters with multiple possible directions, sharing some nautical encounter setups seemed like a fine idea.

These encounter setups work for characters on a ship at sea or traveling along the coastline close to the water. They can be used as random encounters, as the setup for a series of encounters you build out from these initial ideas, or as an initial-encounter hook for an even larger adventure.

Art from the Dungeon Master’s Guide

Yo Ho Ho

As the characters approach a small fishing village, they spot a pirate vessel anchored offshore and bloodthirsty buccaneers shouting in the streets. If the characters storm in looking for a fight, the pirates might simply be enjoying some shore leave and paying the locals well for food, drink, and entertainment. Alternatively, the settlement might be the hiding place of a first mate who fled the pirates’ service with a collection of treasure maps, and the buccaneers will tear the town apart unless the first mate and the maps are found — or the characters stop them.

Saved from the Sea

Shattered wreckage spotted on the water turns out to have a near-unconscious humanoid clinging to it — a survivor of a shipwreck. The survivor might be a sailor whose gratitude for being rescued sees them offer to lead the characters to a site of buried treasure. Or the survivor might secretly be a member of a cult, pretending to be adrift and waiting to be rescued, and leading the characters not to treasure but to the cult’s island enclave to be sacrificed.

Merfolk Meeting

The characters spot a strange vessel rising from the water — an open-deck magic submersible crewed by merfolk. The merfolk might be making initial forays toward trading with the folk of coastal towns, giving the characters the opportunity to set up initial contacts or even act as brokers for trade between the settlements of the coast and the undersea. Alternatively, the merfolk might be on a mission of vengeance, looking for a pirate vessel or local warship whose crew slaughtered a pod of dolphins under the merfolk’s protection — and willing to take their revenge against any surface folk.

Strange Waters

One or more rare sea creatures — whales, dragon turtles, and so forth — are seen swimming through shipping lanes, local fishing grounds, or other waters they would never normally travel through. The characters first need to deal with the creatures damaging watercraft or docks, then determine what’s caused this strange migration. It might turn out that the creatures have been driven from their usual waters by some sort of magical disaster that needs investigation. It could be the case that corrupted merfolk druids or sahuagin enchanters have directed the creatures to attack folk of the surface. Or the creatures might be under the magical control of a cult seeking to claim territory along the coast, acting as the vanguard of a much larger aquatic assault.

Sudden Shipwreck

Along a coastline the characters have traveled multiple times, a shipwreck is suddenly visible at low tide where no wreck was seen before, in waters with no dangerous obstructions and with no storms in recent weeks. The wreck might be a vessel that foundered when a cursed but valuable magical relic on board forced the crew to abandon ship. It might have been disgorged by a natural portal recently opened in the seabed, and through which aquatic monsters from another part of the world will be drawn if the portal isn’t closed. Or it might be a rare mega-mimic with a penchant for feeding on underwater treasure hunters.

Mysterious Lighthouse

When traveling in a storm or attacked by seafaring monsters, the characters take refuge in a remote lighthouse that reveals itself to be empty, despite its magical light shining from dusk to dawn. As the characters explore, they might discover the lighthouse staffed by the benevolent ghosts of all its former keepers, who have a quest they need fulfilled. Or they might discover that the magically automated site is now used as a meeting place by a nefarious seafaring cult, whose members arrive to deal with the intruders who tripped their magical alarms.

Going in All Directions

Encounter setups that have a single throughline are often the main way that the narrative of a D&D game is advanced. Investigating an unusual phenomena leads to an ambush. A gauntlet of traps and hazards needs to be run. A chance meeting in a tavern brings the characters into contact with a powerful ally. A noble takes umbrage at a perceived slight and becomes the party’s nemesis. In any and all such scenarios, there’s a clear sense that one thing is meant to happen in response to the characters’ entrance, and that’s how the scene should play out.

Setting up encounters that have only a single primary narrative goal usually works just fine in the game (at least within a larger framework where the characters have enough agency to shape which encounters they undertake and how their story advances when those encounters are done). Sometimes, though, the players and the characters can surprise you in ways that can quickly make a single-thread setup go off the rails. An encounter that you expect to be a social challenge suddenly turns into combat when the characters grow overly suspicious of an NPC’s actions. The players ignore what felt like an obvious hook meant to draw them to a specific location and instead wander off in a different direction.

Art by Carmen Sinek from the Dungeon Master’s Guide

As a general rule, combat scenarios make good examples of how having only one way for the characters to push through them can lead to problems. As most GMs have experienced at one time or another, setting up the single win condition of “one side beats the other side into submission” can lead to a disastrous outcome when the players want their characters to flee or attempt to bargain with their foes, but the encounter offers no good way for them to do so. (You can get great advice for building more open-ended combat encounters in lots of places, including the excellent book Forge of Foes that I had a hand in.) But the kind of narrative bottleneck that shows up easily in a straight-line combat encounter can easily derail any type of in-game scenario.

Just Winging It

As a GM, I usually have a great time when the game goes off in unexpected directions, because I’ve been playing long enough that I can quickly work up alternative scenarios to where I was expecting an encounter to go. But if you sometimes have trouble reworking story on the fly or improvising resolutions to unexpected developments in the campaign story, it can be a great exercise to build uncertainty into your encounters right from the start. 

When setting up an encounter, whether that means creating encounters from whole cloth in a homebrew story or making notes on encounters while running a published adventure, think about ways that each encounter might play out along two or more different threads of narrative. That way, whichever of the threads the characters tug at, you know ahead of time how you’re going to handle that. And even if the players decide to ignore all the prepared threads in favor of unspooling an unexpected thread of their own, having thought about the encounter and the surrounding scenario as a range of possibilities rather than a single throughline puts you in a better position to reassemble the narrative on the fly.

One Way or Another

Here are five quick encounter scenarios to give you a sense of what I’m talking about. Each of the following scenarios is set up with two broad approaches that the characters and players might pick up on, just to keep things simple. But you can just as easily come up with three or four possible throughlines — just as you can expect the players to come up with throughlines of their own that you never anticipated.

Thief! Thief?

A pickpocket appears to have stolen a valuable possession from a character (a weapon, a magic item, and so forth), but the character immediately realizes that they still have the seemingly stolen item on their person. If the characters pursue the thief to figure out what’s going on, it turns out that the stolen object was an illusion intended to draw them into a chase and an ambush. If the characters ignore the thief (perhaps because they assume the above scenario is playing out), it turns out that the thief magically swapped the real possession for a shapechanging item carrying a powerful curse that spreads to all the characters one by one — and which can be lifted only by passing on the item in the same way.

Too Quiet

Entering a nondescript tavern, the characters discover the patrons and staff all acting unusual — strangely distracted, speaking in whispers, ignoring their ordered food and drink, and so forth. If the characters are instinctively suspicious of the people in the tavern, it turns out that this is the secret meeting place of a cult planning a humanoid sacrifice for later that night. If the characters initially assume that the patrons and staff are victims of foul play, it turns out that the patron at a corner table is a powerful enchanter testing out an unstable magical relic that lets him control people en masse.

Wild Party

The characters receive an invitation to a gentry’s grand ball, where the duke of the realm is the most prestigious guest. At midnight, the duke is suddenly grabbed by armed intruders who attempt to spirit them away. If the characters do nothing, the duke is kidnapped and the party is accused of being complicit through their inaction. If the characters intervene to protect the duke, the intruders are out-of-uniform guards attacking because they know the duke is actually a doppelganger — who might be the only person who knows the whereabouts of the actual duke, kidnapped hours earlier. 

Our Flag Means One of Two Things

While traveling along a remote section of seacoast, the characters come across a hidden cove occupied by armed sailors who appear to be running a well-established pirate operation. If the characters attempt to treat with the pirates, the group is revealed to be working for a local merchant lord who sends the pirates after the ships of their enemies — and who can’t let the party leave the cove to reveal their secret. If the characters instinctively attack the pirates, they turn out to be a group fighting against a corrupt local leader whose warships have been attacking settlements behind in their tax payments.

Hag Hijinks

The characters come across a remote village whose folk are ravaged by a magical malady, and who blame a hag dwelling in a nearby grove for their plight. If the characters go after the hag directly, the hag is revealed to be trying to help the villagers, and can reveal that the source of the malady is a cursed magic relic brought to the village by a secret cultist. If the characters investigate the situation in the village first, they discover that a local alchemist has incurred the wrath of the hag by kidnapping her toad familiar — which has escaped and must now be found before it can be returned.

Ride Easy

Your mileage may vary, but when I first started playing D&D, it was a bit of a thrill when things got to the point wealth-wise when any of my characters could afford a horse. Owning an imaginary horse always felt really cool to me, because horses in fantasy games are fun. Having friends who play fantasy games who are really into horses and can tell you what type of IRL horse your character should ride makes it even more fun, as is those friends’ ability to point out how bad the rules for horses are in most games. But that’s incidental to the current topic.

The addition of mounts to the game cuts down travel time, allows for the easy outrunning of less nimble monsters, lets the characters dramatically storm into town in a cloud of dust, and ties into all other kinds of archetypes from the medieval/Wild West-hero playbook. But horses and other mounts can introduce a particular logistical issue with the story of a campaign — a problem unrelated to the actual rules for running mounts — that’s worth thinking about.

Art by Darlene from the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide

Don’t Hurt the Horse!

Animals becoming endangered in a story is a huge trauma trigger for many people, and for pretty obvious reasons. A lot of us generate intense amounts of emotional attachment to the animals we make part of our lives, and the experience of loving and being loved by a furry friend can be life changing. Many folks easily develop emotional attachments to animals in fiction for the same reason. And because RPGs connect our real lives and our engagement with stories in extraordinarily powerful ways, it’s not a surprise that when characters’ mounts are threatened in the game, it can easily mess with the fun.

Talking about animal welfare in the game is an excellent topic for session 0. During the preamble to a new campaign, players discussing their expectations for play can note how comfortable they are with violence directed toward animals, whether mounts, companion creatures, or animals acting as threats in the game. Some might want the campaign to avoid the topic entirely. Others might be fine with having animals as threats fighting against the player characters, while wanting to avoid threats to the characters’ mounts and companions. Other others might be fine with threats against the characters’ four-legged friends as long as the GM doesn’t arbitrarily target them for no reason.

In the event that the topic doesn’t come up in session 0, all players should understand that they can bring it up during a game session. If a story goes into narrative territory that’s making them uncomfortable, players should say so, whether that’s harm befalling a character’s companion, mount, or pet, or the party being expected to mow through non-evil animal threats with no options for noncombat resolution to the conflict.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

A problem that comes up more often with mounts than animal companions (most of whom are either kitted out for combat themselves or small enough to hide during a fight) is worrying about what happens to them if they’re left on their own. Especially for characters traveling the uninhabited frontier that’s typical of many fantasy campaigns, it can be especially advantageous for a party to be able to roll up to the dungeon on horseback. But it can be equally easy for the players to then worry about what might happen when the party’s horses are left alone in the monster-haunted wilderness while the characters delve into the nearby ruins.

A house rule I came up with long before I’d even heard of the concept of session 0 is to go all meta and establish ahead of time that the GM isn’t going to mess with the character’s mounts as long as the characters do their level best to keep their mounts out of danger. If the horses are left hidden in the forest while the characters head off on their dungeon long weekend, they’ll fend for themselves and be right as rain when the party makes it back into the light. During a random encounter on the road, if the mounts are quickly hopped off and ordered away from the fight, they’ll steer clear of danger while the characters finish dealing with it. This approach will definitely stretch realism from time to time, but that stretch is more than worth the players not having to worry about a trusty mount ending up as part of a wandering dire wolf buffet.

A Horse of a Different Color

Although horses are the typical mount in most fantasy campaigns, the fun of obtaining a mount for the first time can be made even more enjoyable with an unusual mount. Griffons and hippogriffs are apex-cool flying mounts, carrying an enormous amount of predator gravitas, while giant dragonflies make equally great aerial steeds for Small characters. In a subterranean-focused campaign, giant spiders and cave lizards make excellent mount choices — especially when fitted with saddles that allow a rider to stay on board while their mount clambers upside down along ceilings. Axe beaks and polar bears make formidable mounts in arctic climes. And in a plane-hopping campaign, a phase spider makes a most iconic ride.

Moreover, the best part about obtaining an unusual mount often isn’t the mount themself — it’s the story setting up how your character and that mount got together. Did you earn a creature’s trust after saving their life? Were they a mount trained by someone else and offered to you as a reward for service, or who you rescued from an abusive owner? Being able to afford a mount is a nice milestone for a starting character. But being able to say you truly earned a mount is even better.

 

NPCs Who Go Both Ways

No, not like that. Though I think we can all agree that the best NPCs… well, let’s save that for another post.

What I want to talk about today are nonplayer characters who can serve double duty in terms of the part they play in a fantasy campaign, because you as GM have set them up to be useful allies to the characters, or to be sinister foes for the characters — and you don’t get to decide which path they take or who they ultimately are.

I make the following point a lot, so if you’ve heard it before, please bear with me. For me, RPGs are the most fun when unexpected things happen, but as GMs, we don’t get to deal with as much of the unexpected as the players do. Every new encounter, every dungeon door opened, every conversation with a mysterious hermit or suspicious barkeep kicks the game forward on a moment of uncertainty that hooks the players in because they want to know what happens next. But because the GM ostensibly knows what happens next almost all of the time, the fun of not knowing is largely denied us during the game. 

Loving that feel of uncertainty in the game is why I love things like wandering monsters done right, or rolling for random magic items and seeing what the players and characters do with them. It’s why I love the idea of dropping NPCs into a campaign without knowing what their true goals and personality are, or how well those things might or might not line up with what the player characters are doing. Because when I set up those NPCs, I know that I’m going to let the players decide those things, without them even realizing it.

First Impressions

When the characters first interact with an NPC, they might be drawn in by an empathetic reaction to whatever problem that NPC is going through. They might be instinctively suspicious because of circumstances, or because they’re aware that their enemies are plotting against them and they don’t know who they can trust. They might be indifferent, warily trusting but wanting to learn more information before engaging fully. And all those options are fine — unless you break out your NPCs with a clear and singular sense of who they’re meant to be. Because when you do that, you’ll eventually end up with the player characters loving NPCs you’d explicitly expected them to hate, or suspicious of NPCs who are there to lend them important aid, or indifferent to NPCs who you needed the characters to engage with in order to advance the story.

Every GM has had these sorts of experiences. Quest givers who the characters ignore, people needing help who the players assume are villains, villains who the characters get chummy with because their setup as NPCs makes them feel more nuanced than you’d ever intended, and on and on. But if you set up your NPCs instead as a kind of weathervane that can spin freely as the player characters engage with them, you can let the players easily and safely decide who those NPCs are, why they’re there, and what part they’re meant to play in the game.

Enter, Stage Left

I present to you here a few examples of the kinds of NPC setups I’m talking about, taken from an actual game — a three-year homebrew CORE20 campaign I ran a few years ago called “The Serpent and the Rose,” whose main villains were a lycanthrope order unimaginatively known as the Pack. The players in that campaign don’t actually know some of what’s expressed here in terms of the potential these NPCs might have had versus the way they turned out — because the way they turned out was driven entirely by the players’ collective reaction to the NPCs, and the relationships their characters ultimately forged with them as a result.

Hopcyn Raonull (Sheriff of Raharnwyd)

• Scrupulously lawful, has a reputation for turning a blind eye for honest mistakes. He enjoys exchanging favors with others, understanding the long-term bond that creates. 
• Secretly corrupt. He has a terminal condition that responds to remove disease, but not permanently. Has been quietly selling off stolen goods and magic confiscated by the militia for years to pay for magical healing. The Pack will discover this and turn him to their service in exchange for making him a lycanthrope, helping prolong his life.

Maili Mairald (Sage/Historian)

• An absent-minded retired scholar. She pays for rumors, tales, legends, stories, and verifiable history with a seemingly endless supply of coin. (Rumors that she has a permanent everfull purse hidden somewhere on the premises.)
• When the stories she collects have connections to the lore the Pack seeks, she sells that lore freely. The Pack’s fascination with the past promises her a place among them as their control spreads, and she’ll use that to protect herself when the bloodshed starts.

Conor Amastacia (Animyst Healer)

• A retired healer who keeps to himself. A reputation as an old-school type who never cast a spell for anyone who didn’t pay in advance. In secret, he gives free healing to anyone who can’t afford it by taking promises of labor or installment payments that he then never calls in.
• A secret dabbler in fell mind control magic. Working for the Pack, who use that magic to secretly bind local leaders to their control.

Brodrick Rathaill (Militia Captain)

• Talented weapon master and trainer. Can appear overbearing when trying to encourage others to succeed. Dedicated to defending Raharnwyd to the point of needing to be convinced that problems in the wider area are important.
• Driven entirely by ego. Has a problem with anyone except gentry-born like him in positions of militia leadership. Will embrace the influence of the Pack if it helps him get ahead.

The Path Not Taken

With this Schrodinger’s NPCs setup, a character can be both good and evil, both an ally and an enemy, until the players make a decision about who that NPC truly is and the game takes shape around that. Talking about the examples above, the players gravitated toward Sheriff Hopcyn Raonull so fast that I swear I heard an audible “Woosh!” during the game. They became fast friends right from the start, and that was great. In my notes, I dropped his potential for corruption even as I respun the narrative of him needing magical healing for secret reasons a couple of times to make it work within the context of a trusted ally. But in the end, even that got set aside when I realized it wasn’t necessary anymore. Because the players and characters had already forged the bond with Hopcyn that I had wanted that detail to catalyze.

Likewise, the absent-minded Maili Mairald became someone the players and characters felt responsible for and began watching over. Working off that, her corruption angle got replaced by a magical secret she held that could feed the characters important information — and which would make gaining that information always feel earned because of the players’ love for the character.

Conor Amastacia and Brodrick Rathaill, by contrast, were distrusted from the moment the characters set eyes on them. The story driven by that antipathy subsequently unfolded in legendary fashion, because it was built on a foundation of the players freely and honestly deciding how to react to an NPC, then having that reaction pay off. But there’s a never-played alternative version of the campaign out there in the multiverse somewhere where the healer and the militia captain became the party’s two strongest allies, while the corrupt sheriff and the conniving lorist became enemies who would have actively tried to take the characters down. And in either version of the campaign, the strength of the bond between the players, the characters, and the NPCs has been decided by the players, letting me as GM build on that unexpected outcome either way.