The Dream Tombs: Backstory as Adventure

As a GM, I’ve always been a big fan of when character backstory works its way into the campaign. I enjoy when players see fit to reveal secrets about their characters. I love when backstory is revealed in key moments to underline the drama of a roleplaying scene — or sometimes even a combat encounter.

Character backstory working its way into the campaign spontaneously often comes in response to specific beats of narrative pressure. Something happens in the campaign and a player sees the opportunity to have their character react in a way that reveals something about who they are. Other times, fate or the actions of villains push the heroes into a corner that inspires the revelation of a secret a character had hoped to take with them to the grave — but which their player has been dying for a chance to let slip.

Sometimes, though, the opportunities for characters to reveal backstory don’t come as often as we’d like, or certain players might not have as much emotional investment in backstory as others. So if you’re looking for an excuse to bring a bunch of backstory into your game in a fun way, the following adventure setup can help you make that happen.

What Dreams May Come?

This adventure setup is taken from a dungeon site called the Dream Tombs, which I set up for one of my weekly CORE20 campaigns. What follows is entirely generic, though, and suitable for pretty much any fantasy game.

To set up what I wanted to do, I sent the players the following email before our session:

Unlike many of the adventuring escapades we share together, the one we’ll be starting today comes with a bit of homework. I’d like you all to come up with three bits of backstory for your character that you’re comfortable sharing with the group. This can include story elements in the three secrets you all provided at the start of the campaign, but doesn’t have to.

What I’m looking for are specific meaningful events from your character’s life involving action, other characters, and so forth. So perhaps a pivotal interaction with family or comrades, a dangerous situation that had to be overcome, a moment during an important job that went really well or really badly, et al. Something momentous on a personal level that would make a good scene in a movie.

The “three secrets” mentioned in the email refer to the pre-session-zero character-building conversations I like to have with the players leading into a new campaign. It’s totally not necessary to make the Dream Tombs scenario work, and I find that even without that kind of preliminary framework, many players have a sense of a secret or two their characters are keeping to themselves.

Records of the Past

The Dream Tombs in my campaign were a complex of ancient crypts protected by powerful magic and holding secrets the characters were looking for. But the choice of location for this scenario is totally up to you. In addition to a tomb or crypt, the theme of secrets and backstory being brought forward into the campaign might be apropos for a magical library, a warded laboratory or guildhall, a ruined wizard’s tower, or any other location where suitable magic can come into play. 

As the characters explore the site, alongside whatever other location features you prep, work in one physical detail — small pieces of parchment that are scattered across or hidden within the site. Some of the parchment fragments are old. Others are relatively new. All feature notes in different languages and different handwriting, with each parchment a record of some incident or event, anonymous and unsigned. 

Describe the notes as seemingly written by someone wanting to record a thing they’d done, a conversation they had, or something that happened to them. As the characters have a chance to find more of the notes, describe them further as carrying a sense of yearning for the past — or in a many cases, a sense of regret or fear for that past.

Living the Memory

At any appropriate points during the session, the magic of the site triggers. This could be a thing that happens at regular intervals while the characters explore or linger, or in response to characters touching certain things, fighting certain guardians, and so forth.

Choose a character randomly and have their player choose one of the memories they came up with. Then have that player narrate that backstory memory. Describe the scenario as the character slipping into a kind of fugue state and going through the motions of the memory event, even as illusion magic unfolds around them to share that memory with the other characters. Work with the player to build up the description of the memory vision and make it real, asking questions to expand certain moments, suggesting additional details, and so forth.

Then, when the vision is done, tell the players that even as the illusion magic fades away and the character comes back to their senses, that character sees a piece of parchment manifest in front of them to fall to the ground. On that parchment, they see a written record of the vision just shared, magically scribed in their own handwriting.

Cost or Reward

Depending on the nature of the site where these dreams manifest, the revelation of backstory and secrets might be enough of a narrative reward to carry your memory scenes. But you might also attach benefits or drawbacks to each memory, so that the characters are rewarded or punished by the magic tapping into their psyches. For example, if the characters are making an incursion into an enemy site set to end in a boss battle, the magic might provide them with one-off benefits as their memories let them recall moments of past inspiration or draw new resolve from memories of failure. 

Alternatively, if the characters are exploring a site that calls out for putting pressure on them as they explore, each memory might impose penalties or conditions on the character experiencing it — or even on all the characters as they share that memory. (When I used this scenario, the Dream Tombs were that kind of site. The characters were searching for a specific tomb and the treasure it contained, and the longer they took, the more debilitating memory-visions they would have to face.)

Inspiration for Story

In addition to the fun of bringing specific backstory elements and secrets into your campaign within a solid narrative framework, this adventure setup can have the added bonus of inspiring players to think more about their backstories — especially players who are more about playing in the moment, and who might have given little thought to their character’s life before the campaign began. One of the best bits of feedback I got from a player after we finished our Dream Tombs scenario was their lament that they hadn’t gotten a chance to share all three of the memories they’d written up. Especially if the players in your campaign aren’t naturally big into backstory — and this can often be true of new players — bringing memories to life this way in the course of an adventure can be a great start.

Art by Dean Spencer

Out of Time!

It has been an age and a bit since I last posted anything to this blog aside from the monthly collection of daily fantasy roleplaying gaming tips I drop on BlueSky and Mastodon dice.camp. The primary reason for that is that I’ve been working like a maniac as the lead editor for Draw Steel, the MCDM RPG. In fact, I’ve been working like a maniac on Draw Steel since late 2024 (and loving every minute of it), but the last four months or so have been especially filled with time crunch.

Despite that time crunch, though — and despite the downside of being so flat-out busy working with other wonderful folks that I run out of time to work on my own stuff — I still manage to run two CORE20 games every week on top of a D&D 5e game I’m playing in. And when you’re running low on time to sleep, finding time to prep the games you’re running can be a challenge.

For one of my CORE20 campaigns a couple of months back, I ran five sessions of built-from-scratch homebrew adventure, set up with about two hours of prep. Not two hours per session, but two hours for all five sessions — fifteen or so solid hours of gaming. And now that I have a bit of downtime again, I thought it would be fun to break down my process, which covers a number of specific approaches I’ve found useful for prepping games when the amount of time you have to prep games approaches zero.

The Framework

A while back, I talked about a framework for fast game prep that can help you create a solid two-hour one-shot session in less than 10 minutes. The process I’m going to talk about here reflects that approach to some degree, but expands to the idea of prepping multiple sessions for an ongoing campaign, not just creating single-session adventures.

Is it possible to treat a homebrew campaign or adventure as an excuse to never stop writing notes, ideas, NPCs, monsters, history, and more? Yes it is. And it’s fun to do so if time permits! But what I’m talking about here is a minimalist approach where what you’re looking for is the maximum return on your time, in the sense of being able to say, “This five minutes of prep will let me fill an hour of game time.”

Home(brew) is Where the Heart Is

As a general setup, fast prep is almost always about homebrew adventure design. Because over many years of running games, one of the odd truths I’ve discovered is that running your own homebrew adventures takes less time commitment than running published adventures. On the face of it, that might seem odd, given that published adventures do all that writing and story design stuff for you. But the reality is that doing the kind of close study and notetaking you need to really get a feel for a published adventure and a sense of how you want to run it takes a lot of time. Certainly, for a great adventure, that can be time well spent. But when your time budget is flat broke, something’s got to give.

Being only half-prepared to run a published adventure can be a tense experience. But being only half-prepared to run a completely homebrew session can be exhilarating, because you get a much better return on your creative investment from making things up on the fly than you do from looking things up on the fly as you try to remember where your published adventure is meant to go next. 

Lay of the Land

To build out an adventure quickly, start with a cool map. Or, as I did for the multiple sessions I needed to plan with no time, start with several maps you can easily link together. Two types of maps are ideal for fast prep — those with straightforward features that don’t require a lot of notes (wilderness, caverns, simple dungeons), and those that are so detailed you can just pull information off the map (detailed city locations, manor houses, fortresses, and so forth). Avoid locations such as a wizard’s tower where you’re going to need to think up a bunch of wild details to support that location. You want to be able to wing that sort of information on the fly, whether you’re coming up with generic details for an underground grotto, or saying “There’s an oak chest in the corner of the sitting room” because that’s what the map shows.

For my campaign, I scored five maps from Dice Grimorium — one of a number of cartographers I back on Patreon — all part of a “Cave Tunnels” series. Then I let the maps springboard the other fast-prep components of the extended adventure.

Thematic Inspiration

When you’re putting together a full adventure in a hurry, focus on a singular theme that you can use to suggest monsters, traps, and other mechanical components, and which you can easily fall back on as inspiration when you’re talking up description and mood. For my adventure, the cool colored crystals on the map immediately suggested “elemental caverns,” so that’s what I went with, setting up different colors of crystals on the different maps. One level each of earth caverns, water caverns, air caverns, and fire caverns. Then inspired by the theme, I grabbed a final level taken from a similar map series showing four eldritch cauldrons around a vast pit (seen above), which I decided would make a most excellent power source for the elemental caverns above.

Fight the Good Fight

If you’re playing any sort of campaign in which monster hunting is the characters’ jam, planning combat-focused sessions is one of the best ways to maximize your prep time, because setting up combat is way faster than the time filled out by running it.

While the characters figured out how to cross a chasm in the earth cavern, I decided that they’d come under attack from transfixers — the CORE20 upgrade to the piercer, which first magically dazes you, then launches from the ceiling to arc through the air toward their targets like a stalactite air-to-surface missile. It was a monster the characters had never encountered before, making the fight feel fresh, and a good fit for the location and the earth/rock theme.

For the water level, I worked up a tougher-than-usual wight guardian — breaking from the elemental theme in order to introduce a mystery (talked about below). For the air level, an air spawn (the CORE20 air elemental) was on guard and perpetually pissed at anyone trying to steal valuable elemental crystals (talked about at “Treasure” below). 

For the fire cavern, the elemental crystals embedded into the walls were the threat, erupting with energy randomly whenever the characters got too close. These weren’t set up as traps, though, but effectively static combat threats that the characters were fully aware of, then needed to “fight” their way through.

The combat encounters through the elemental caverns were fairly straightforward in terms of threat level. So then for the cauldron cavern, I got to break out the big guns for a climactic challenging encounter — a fiendish vrock drawn to lair within the flow of magic boiling up from the well and through the cauldrons. Oh, and each round, the cauldrons would lash out toward a random character with elemental energy — though not in the way they expected (see “Treasure!” below).

It’s a Mystery

Setting up a simple mystery the players can ruminate on and solve is a great way to heighten engagement — and comes with the benefit that players thinking through a mystery are doing most of the work while you play. For this adventure, the combat with the advanced wight led to the discovery of another group of wights, all previously destroyed (and thus inert), but with no signs of battle around them. Each showed wounds consistent with having been executed while alive, allowing them to be transformed into wights by corrupting magic in the cavern. But each had also then been executed again as a wight, with no signs of struggle or having been bound.

The strange nature of this seeming sacrifice was something the players latched onto immediately, and generated an awesome amount of discussion around what circumstances might have caused it. The truth behind the mystery — which the players figured out in good time — was that this was a group who had discovered the caverns, become corrupted by the energy of the cauldrons when they used one to destroy an enemy army above the site, and were transformed into servants of the cauldrons’ magic. The group collectively decided to end their lives rather than follow the cauldrons’ directive to leave the caverns and become walking conduits for destructive elemental power, with the advanced wight the last survivor. But if the players had come up with another explanation that felt even more dramatic, I would have absolutely made use of that instead. That kind of course correction in response to figuring out a mystery is a special gift to the GM who doesn’t have time to prep, wherein without even knowing they’re doing so, the players write up the backstory you didn’t have time to figure out. 

Raise the Stakes

The final piece of the no-time-to-prep prep process was setting up a clear conundrum for the players to deal with. This came in the form of the cauldrons, with the dead-wights mystery and the scouring elemental power witnessed during the vrock fight confirming that the magic of the site was far too dangerous to just walk away from. Dumping the cauldrons into the pit was an obvious solution to that problem, but doing so incorporated the challenge of each cauldron being too heavy for any one character to move, and programmed to lash out with corrupting power if anyone got too close. 

Destroying the cauldrons using a careful approach of moving in behind them, lassoing each of them in turn, throwing the rope across the pit, then pulling from the other side played out over most of one session — literally two minutes of prep time to set up a couple of hours’ worth of planning and roleplaying. Part of the reason that worked is that the characters had no access to any magic that could have destroyed the cauldrons outright. But if they had, I would have simply adjusted the cauldrons’ potency to make sure that a certain amount of discussion and problem-solving would remain.

Treasure!

The final piece of the campaign-building puzzle is the rewards to be bestowed upon the characters for facing off against the challenges you’ve laid out for them. Looking to your theme and your map locations for inspiration is a good starting point for rewards, and I did so to come up with two ideas. 

First, a certain small number of the elemental crystals found throughout the caverns had become saturated with elemental power that would remain in them if they were removed. With a sense that these special crystals would be valuable assets to crafters creating elemental-themed magic items, the characters were meticulous in locating and claiming them.

Second, the theme of elemental power and the idea of the wights having been corrupted by that power to become servants of it set up the idea that during the final fight, the cauldrons lashing out against the characters wasn’t actually an attack. Rather, it was an attempt to infuse the characters with magic that would eventually tie to them to the cauldrons as corrupted servants. For the first couple of cauldron “attacks,” the characters made their saves and so knew nothing about this. But when the first character failed their save and found themselves gaining the ability to cast a variant-damage fireball, the fight got more interesting. When one of the characters then realized that the power they were absorbing was tying them to the cauldrons, the fight got more interesting again.

Game On

It’s literally taken me longer to write up this post than it did to prep the fifteen-or-so hours of gaming whose setup I’ve described here. Doing campaign prep is fun for me, and I don’t begrudge myself time spent making notes, sketching out ideas, and assembling the building blocks of a cool adventure. But even if you’re like me and think of campaign prep as time well spent, focusing on a simplified framework for adventure design can be a good experience — especially when you find yourself in a time crunch and need a different approach.

The Character Crucible

My first really tangible RPG character (by which I mean a character I rolled up who I actually wanted to play long-term, as opposed to one of the many characters-of-the-week that 1st edition AD&D was so often about) was Morgan — a human fighter who was a direct lift in every way from the character Travis Morgan in Mike Grell’s comic The Warlord. I borrowed the name. I borrowed the look (though my Morgan favored chain mail over the comic character’s leotard-or-loincloth vibe). I borrowed the character’s philosophy of believing in a world where the credo wasn’t “Might make right,” but “Might for right.”

From The Warlord issue 7 (“The Iron Devil”),
written and illustrated by Mike Grell. 

My second really tangible character — rolled up not long after Morgan, and played alongside him as inseparable friends for many years — was a human magic-user named Stormhand, whose inspiration was largely, “What would it be like if I could cast spells?” Stormhand was a self-insert character, with no external inspiration and no real sense of what he even looked like beyond “usually brooding.” Playing him was entirely about giving me a chance to act like the forthright, driven, confident problem-solver I was pretty sure I could have been in high school except for all that incapacitating social awkwardness stuff.

From these two extremes, I learned pretty early in my RPG life that there’s no single right way to build a character. And over the course of having created many characters and having watched friends and family members build many, many more through decades of campaigns, I’ve noted certain key patterns of character inspiration that all players can tap into.

Fictional Inspiration

Here’s an important tip, especially for first-time players: No one else in the game will care if you lift your character concept straight from your favorite work of fiction. You can probably even get away with playing them under their own name, as I did with Morgan all those many years ago, though coming up with a new name can be most effective at disguising the character’s origins. Your acrobatic unarmed brawler on the run from the assassins guild that trained her? No one else will care that everything you throw into the character at the table comes straight from how much you love Black Widow from the Marvel-verse. That stoic elf archer who pulls out two shortswords when the monsters get up close and personal? You can probably even take a shot at using Orlando Bloom’s accent as you Legolas your way through the campaign.

You, but Better

I say “You, but better” with the following qualifier: You are already awesome, and I can safely say that without even knowing you because the fact that you play tabletop RPGs puts you in a special class of awesome people. But all of us, no matter how awesome we are, have things we yearn for that we don’t have the opportunity to do — and letting the character you play tap into those things can be an amazing exercise in personal fulfillment. On a basic level, we live in a world bereft of fantasy magic, so that playing an arcanist, a healer, or a wielder of primal energy can tap into a deep-seated yearning to know what magic might feel like. Likewise, there are plenty of monstrous and evil people in our world — a point that’s become especially acute at this particular point in history. But most of us are never in a position to directly oppose that evil the way our fantasy RPG characters can. 

With this mode of character creation, your character’s outlook, desires, and approach to life are all rooted firmly in your own life, your own philosophies and convictions. Then you get to push those philosophies and convictions to new extents by virtue of bringing who you are into the game, wrapped in the guise of the character the game lets you make. 

Product of the Past

Sometimes one of the most engaging ways to create a character is to have no strong sense of who the character is — because figuring that out is the point of playing the game. This mode of character building focuses almost entirely on backstory, as you create the strongest possible sense of where your character comes from. Then, armed only with that sense of what’s brought the character to the point where the campaign begins, you let the ups and downs of the campaign determine who the character becomes over time. This approach works especially well in a sandbox-style campaign with no set narrative arc, allowing the evolution of the character to help drive the campaign story, and vice versa.

That said, be aware that GMs are always on the lookout for backstory-driven characters who use that backstory as an excuse to resist being drawn into the campaign. Usually this takes the form of players complaining that their character isn’t feeling the incentive to go into the dungeon, rescue the missing prince, or what have you — so don’t be that player. It’s up to you, not the GM, to come up with reasons why your always-in-progress character wants to engage with the campaign story as it unfolds.

Goal Oriented

The opposite approach to focusing on your character’s past is to think primarily about what your character wants for the future. A goal-oriented character zeroes in on the traditional benchmarks for a character in literary fiction. What do they want? What do they need? How do the character’s want and need differ? And at what point do they realize that what they need is more important than what they want? A character with a rock-solid set of future goals will still definitely have a past that connects to those goals. But when building a goal-oriented character, you’ll usually find yourself leaving that past sketchy, then fleshing it out as the events of the campaign produce moments connected to your goals that you want to in turn connect to the past.

Mix and Match

Naturally, none of the above modes of character creation need to be adhered to exclusively, and you can combine any of these ideas in any number of ways. You might start with fictional inspiration and decide to make that fictional character you love into an avatar of your own beliefs and desires. You might start off with a goal-oriented character who suddenly generates a much more detailed backstory than you initially had in mind. You might start out with a solid backstory and a blank slate of where the character might go and why, then realize immediately that the character embodies a favorite fantasy archetype you hadn’t been thinking about.

If you’ve been gaming for a long while and have never thought about your character creation process, you probably draw from some of the frameworks above without actually thinking about them in these terms. Building characters is an instinctive kind of fun for most players. But thinking about the specific foundations of your process can make that process even more interesting — or put you in a better position to help newer players figure out their own process.

Avoid Character-as-Features

In addition to the four modes of character creation and development presented above, there’s a fourth mode that I generally warn people against, but which becomes ever-more prevalent as games like D&D 5e become ever-more feature focused. In a class-based RPG, deciding what class to play is often the first choice a player makes, and reasonably so. But a focus on choosing a class and subclass and all the special features that extend out from those initial choices makes it way too easy to create a character exclusively from the perspective of game features and mechanics. 

Now, there’s nothing wrong with loving the features and mechanics of a particular character class. If some aspect of playing a fighter or a paladin or a rogue or a warlock appeals to you, go for it. But in my experience — speaking both about the characters I’ve played and the many more characters I’ve seen other people play in the games I run — characters built primarily as a collection of class features in search of a story have a much harder time finding that story. As much as is possible, think about class features as something you build onto a character concept crafted in a more narrative-focused way, rather than hoping that the features will suggest a narrative to you. Because the story that mechanical features can tell is a lot more limited than the many other options your character-building imagination will come up with if you let it.

Beautifully Broken

Let me tell you about one of the best characters I ever played — a sorcerer who didn’t want to be a sorcerer. This was for a Pathfinder 1e campaign some years ago, where the characters were setting out to create a new settlement in a monster-haunted wilderness. The original concept for the character was a multiclass sorcerer/archer, a ranged attack-focused, tactically minded double threat with weapon or spell. But then I remembered the inherent problems with D&D 3.5e/Pathfinder 1e contrast multiclassing (as opposed to class combos that feed each other), which inevitably builds characters who can do twice as much stuff but are always half as good at that stuff as everybody else.

So at some point, I thought to myself, “What happens if you play a sorcerer who actually really, really wants to be ranger but could never pull it off?”

On that day, Zabbas Kindark was born — a half-elf sorcerer whose selection of spells was based entirely on making her look and act like the ranger she’d always wanted to be. She used a bow in combat (courtesy of the Ancestral Arms ancestry trait), and filled out her starting spell list with things like magic weapon, true strike, gravity bow, arrow eruption, and the like. And as I put her together and started playing her, I realized very quickly that the coolest thing about Zabbas was that even maxed out with magic, she was never going to be anywhere as good a ranger as a regular ranger would have been. 

Zabbas was absolutely and wonderfully suboptimized. A character whose build was beautifully broken — which meant that I never wasted a moment worrying about how to maximize her mechanical potential. I just let her run headfirst into the challenges of the campaign story without a care.

The Fine Art of Suboptimization

Playing characters who are the best at what they do can be fun. If you’re playing in a campaign that you know comes with specific thresholds of endless combat challenge, there’s nothing wrong with fine-tuning a character and selecting feats and multiclass options that maximize their combat potential. But until the first time you try not worrying about any of that and just focusing on building a character who feels like the right choice as your avatar in the campaign story, you might not realize how liberating the experience is. 

Whenever I’ve played D&D, I’m the sort of player who comes up a cool character concept relatively easily, then spends a lot of time trying to figure out the best ancestry, class, and multiclass/subclass/prestige-class building blocks with which to build the perfect incarnation of that character. And if that’s you too, the next time you’re building a character for a game, try taking a left turn away from that. 

Think about how you want and expect the baseline character concept to fit into the campaign. Then ask yourself, “How would that work as a cleric? As a monk? As a barbarian?” Go down the list of your favorite classes and imagine the feel of each class as a lens through which your character will be filtered. Or think about some of the classes you’ve never been inspired to play, and think about whether a character concept not rigidly tied to maximizing the benefits of that class would be a good way to try it out.

Next time: Advice for GMs and players on how to make the most out of beautifully broken characters in a campaign — especially campaigns making use of published adventures, which don’t expect that sort of thing.

Welcome!

This is the official intro post to the Missives From Mooncastle blog, the online home of the email newsletter of Insane Angel Studios and Scott Fitzgerald Gray.

Scott Who?

Scott Fitzgerald Gray (9th-level layabout, vindictive good) is a writer of fantasy and speculative fiction, a fiction editor, a story editor, and an editor and designer of roleplaying games — all of which means he finally has the job he really wanted when he was sixteen. His work in gaming covers three editions of the Dungeons & Dragons RPG, including working as an editor on the fifth edition Monster Manual, Dungeon Master’s Guide, Player’s Handbook, Starter Set, and Essentials Kit. 

All told, Scott has written or edited upwards of two hundred books, adventures, and articles for Wizards of the Coast, including writing Dead in Thay in the Tales from the Yawning Portal anthology and being managing editor and co-creative director for the Acquisitions Incorporated book from Wizards of the Coast and Penny Arcade. He’s written or edited for MCDM, Ghostfire Gaming, Schwalb Entertainment, Sly Flourish, Gamehole Publishing, Green Ronin, Frog God Games, and others, as well as for Dragon, Dungeon, Dragon+, and Arcadia magazines. He also creates and publishes under his own Insane Angel Studios imprint, including the recent monstrous-advice-and-tools tome Forge of Foes, created with Mike Shea and Teos Abadía, and the CORE20 RPG — a new classless, freeform-character approach to story-focused d20 fantasy.

Scott shares his life in the Western Canadian hinterland with a schoolteacher, two itinerant daughters, and a number of animal and spirit companions. More info on him and his work (some of it even occasionally truthful) can be found on BlueSky, Mastodon dice.camp, and Twitter (all @scottfgray), and by reading between the lines at insaneangel.com.

What to Expect

The Missives From Mooncastle newsletter covers a broad range of random ideas revolving around Scott’s love of D&D and fantasy gaming. Sometimes this means digging into game mechanics. Other times, it means talking about things we can learn from the older editions of the game that are all but unknown to most new players. Sometimes it’s about making up random adventure or encounter generators, new magic items, or mysterious dungeon maps. And a lot of the time, it’s just a lot of thinking about the unique nature of fantasy RPGs as a medium for shared storytelling.

The blog is updated with new newsletter material on the newsletter’s irregular schedule. But if you’d prefer to get Missives From Mooncastle delivered straight to your inbox, you can subscribe!

The Old Lore

If you glance at the Blog Archive sidebar to the right of the page, you’ll note that even though this is the official intro post to the Missives From Mooncastle blog, there are a bunch of older entries. These are a selection of RPG-themed entries from Scott’s no-longer-extant personal blog, more details of which can be found here.

Soulstones

I renamed phylacteries as “soulstones” in my own games about five minutes after I became aware that “phylactery” was a word referring to an actual thing in the real world of contemporary faith, and not a relic of a dead mythology, as my very white, very Anglo-Saxon, very atheist-but-effectively-Protestant-by-osmosis self had assumed was the case when I first read the word in the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide. 

I swapped the name “golem” for “animata” for similar reasons. I’m in the process of renaming nagas and rakshasas and angels and other creatures in my own game likewise. I did these things because changing names in a game is dead easy. Figuring out how things work, figuring out how rules balance, figuring out the best way to present mechanics and lore — that can be tough.  

Changing a name, though? It’s nothing.

I’ve retroactively changed the names of NPCs in my games. I’ve changed the names of classes and monsters. I’ve changed the names of cities, nations, and historical periods when I realize there’s a name I like better for something than the name I first chose. It’s a non-event every time. 

So the idea that anybody would get bent out shape over acknowledging that the use of “phylactery” by D&D and its progeny games is culturally problematic makes me wonder what exactly it is they’re getting bent about.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

D&D 30 Day Challenge — Day 30

Best DM You’ve Ever Had

At the end of a month of thinking about D&D stuff, and with all the nostalgic reflection that inspires, I’m going to bestow this most prestigious honor on my good friend Kevin. (’Sup, man?) Kevin was the very first DM who ever ran me through a D&D session (as has been recounted here previously and was linked to on Day 1), so on some level, he can be held responsible for how much of my life has been gloriously wasted on this stuff the past thirty-odd years. But even more that, Kev was a DM I always looked up to back in the day, because playing in his games showed me how to be a better DM.

I remember Kevin for the epic scope of his campaigns. (You ever wanted to play a D&D campaign set on Larry Niven’s Ringworld? You ever wanted to play a kick-ass heroic adaptation of Lord of the Rings? We did BOTH AT THE SAME TIME!!!!) I remember the almost perfect amount of detail that went into his games — enough to make a scenario and its setting and characters feel real, but never so much that it felt like an alt-history lesson. I remember his ability to extemporize encounters out of thin air, often with no actual game materials in front of him. I remember with great envy Kev’s ability to keep a campaign moving by adroit improvisation, deftly talking his way out of the most insanely random shit that his unappreciative players (including me) could throw at him.

All the things Kev did (and made look easy, to my eyes at least) comprised skills it took me a long time to master as a DM. And though a number of different DMs (including me) have been behind some of the anecdotes relayed here over the past month, Kev’s games are ones that I still look back on most often. Not just with nostalgia, but for inspiration. I suspect that if DMing has any ultimate goals beyond the entertainment value, the world building, and the sense of satisfaction that comes with helping other people have a good time, being able to inspire players thirty years after the fact is probably high up on the list.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

D&D 30 Day Challenge — Day 29

What is the number you always seem to roll on a d20?

No specific single number shows up more often than any other to my mind and recollection, but there’s a specific range of numbers I roll way too consistently on a d20: Under 10. As a DM, I can (and often do) go through the first ten minutes of combat — making attacks, defense rolls, and saves for a half-dozen monsters — and never roll higher than 9. Not just “rolling badly”, but seriously never rolling anything in double digits. I’m a statistical wonder that way, as my players will attest.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

D&D 30 Day Challenge — Day 28

A Character You Will Never Play Ever Again

Multiclass spellcaster, at least using the D&D 3.x/Pathfinder rules. (5e does multiclass spellcasting quite a bit differently, and though I haven’t had an excuse to experiment with it yet, I suspect it’ll play better than the older systems.) One of my current PCs is a multiclass cleric/sorcerer, and he’s in a great campaign, and I like the character a lot. But when combat rolls around, playing a multiclass caster becomes exactly the same as playing two characters who are slightly lower level than everyone else in the party, and who can only act on alternate turns.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

D&D 30 Day Challenge — Day 27

A Character You Want to Play in the Future

An archer. I haven’t played a straight-up archer in a long time, but I’m DMing two campaigns right now featuring awesome bowslingers (both of whom are actually using the same magic bow; the campaigns are set about twenty-five years apart), and am playing in a campaign alongside an elven ranger who does about a thousand points of longbow damage per round. As such, I'm getting increasingly antsy to break out a (virtual) bow again someday.

I’ve always loved the whole Robin-Hood/Green-Arrow-Longbow-Hunters archetype of distant, moody characters despairing about injustice and the people lost from their lives while they fight for freedom and the common folk — but always from about three hundred feet away where they never take any damage.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

D&D 30 Day Challenge — Day 26

Favorite Nonmagic Item

10-foot pole. No other answers will be accepted.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

D&D 30 Day Challenge — Day 25

Favorite Magic Item

The Machine of Lum the Mad.

(In my own campaign world, this ancient and dangerous artifact has been hidden and rendered largely dormant in a coffee bar — “Joe’s Mud-Puddle Cafe” — in the city of Mooncastle, where it now functions as the espresso machine of Lum the Mad. True story.)

If we’re not counting artifacts, bag of holding, because every edition of the game has specified what happens if you accidentally tear one, but doesn’t specify how tearable it actually is. Plus, even the smallest bag of holding can be filled with 250 pints of oil (that’s by the weight limit; its volume limit is staggeringly higher, but oil is heavy). Dump that out from a height and follow it with a lit torch, then spend hours arguing with the DM over whether it does or doesn’t do 250d6 of fire damage.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

D&D 30 Day Challenge — Day 24

Favorite Energy Type

I like sonic damage from D&D 3e, because no one ever bothers thinking about sonic damage when they’re buffing up with 30 points per round of resist fire, lighting, acid, and cold.

Plus, in games with sonic damage, it’s easier to make fun of bards. And I live to make fun of bards.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

D&D 30 Day Challenge — Day 23

Least Favorite Monster Overall

Devils and demons. It’s not that I don’t like them; it’s just that they don’t make any sense.

There are lots of cool fiends in the game, with pedigrees going all the way back to the AD&D Monster Manual and the earliest days of Dragon magazine. Their mechanics are pretty much always cool. Their design is memorable, their art is always iconic. But where devils and demons break down for me is in the standard backstory of how these extraplanar fiends crave souls and long to destroy the mortal world in order to consume the living — and then somehow just don’t ever seem to get around to doing that.

I’m not a biologist or anything, but I’m at least passingly familiar with the notion that apex predators have lesser populations than the prey they feed upon, and that the number of apex predators is always limited by available prey. Monsters like dragons are typically always rare in an average campaign, because they implicitly obey the laws of predator selection, so that it’s easy to say within the context of a game world, “There are relatively few dragons because of competition between them for prey and territory.” And it’s easy to understand that this is a good thing, because if the numbers of dragons — or beholders or owlbears or behirs or what have you — suddenly doubled or tripled, it would spell disaster as they ate their way through existing natural food stocks, then eventually overwhelmed the humanoid world.

The thing with devils and demons is that they have no such limits on their population. And they have a mission statement that specifically involves overwhelming the humanoid world. And so they’re always, like, “We long to destroy you all!”, and I’m always, like, “Fine; what’s stopping you?” And then they’re, like, “Oh, well, today’s pretty full up. Lot of stuff going on. Blood War and such, you know. So out of the tens of millions of ravening, bloodthirsty, damage-and-magic-resistant shock troops at our disposal, we’ll just send in a half-dozen or so to give this particular group of heroes a bad time. Take that! Nyahh!”

Imagine an imaginary D&D campaign (I know that’s doubly redundant; just work with me) in which I get to play all the devils and demons in the Nine Hells and the Abyss, and you get to play all the people, creatures, and heroes in Greyhawk, or Faerûn, or wherever. I win that campaign every time. In, like, fifteen minutes. So it’s not that I don’t like playing with devils and demons; I just don’t like that unless a DM takes specific measures to limit their numbers and explain why their presence in the world is even more limited (as I do in my own campaign), every devil and demon encounter comes with an obligatory suspension of disbelief that goes over and above the normal levels of suspension of disbelief that are part of the game.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

D&D 30 Day Challenge — Day 22

Favorite Monster Overall

I’m tempted to say the 5e flumph, because the 5e flumph is really cool. When the Monster Manual finally got announced and I was free to talk in generic non-NDA-breaking terms about the work I’d done editing it, the thing I found myself saying most often was, “The flumph is going to blow your mind because it’s now really cool!”, and people were all, like, “Whaaah???”, and I was all, like, “Uh huh!”

Anyway.

I’m going to go for the obvious and say mind flayer. Because even though many monsters have risen to the heights of awesomeness in one edition of D&D or another, the illithids are the only monster I can think of to have hit that mark in every single edition. Right from their starting point in AD&D, mind flayers have exemplified a kind of evil that breaks the alignment system. They were the early epitome of the thinking monster — not just a deadly threat in the dungeon, but hatching plots and plans that could connect adventures and fuel a lifetime’s worth of campaigns.

As a player and DM, I’ve seen plenty of characters who weren’t afraid to die. I’ve played characters who could stand up to dragons. I’ve played alongside and DMed for characters willing to throw themselves into fights against demigods and titans without hesitation. But everybody who knows what a mind flayer is knows to be afraid of mind flayers, and I like that a lot.

(Pro tip: When the mind flayers first appear, playing the music from the Prometheus trailer can really help set the mood. You’re welcome.)

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

D&D 30 Day Challenge — Day 21

Favorite Dragon Color/Type

Of all the dragons, the ancient red wyrm probably has the most iconic feel for me, because Smaug. (Though I can’t remember how Tolkien specifically described Smaug in The Hobbit, his own illustration was the cover of the first version of the book I ever owned, so I consider that canon.) However, my personal favorite in game terms (talking D&D 3e and up, where dragons began to be broken out more fully by age) is actually the red wyrmling.

I love the red wyrmling because — as the toughest of the wyrmlings — it makes a nice challenge for a neophyte party of 1st-level characters whose players might otherwise have assumed they’d have all sorts of time to level up before facing a dragon. Silly players should have paid more attention to the name of the game.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

D&D 30 Day Challenge — Day 20

Favorite Monster (Humanoid/Natural/Fey)

I’m going to extrapolate that “natural” is meant to cover magical beasts, beasts, and monstrosities (depending on which flavor of D&D is your favorite at present) and call this for the owlbear.

At the conceptual level — half bear, half giant owl — the owlbear is quite possibly the most nonsensical straight-up predator ever created. However, its backstory captures an important facet of the essential nature of the game — mad wizards experimenting in dark towers are constantly doing weird shit, and that weird shit will eventually try to kill you.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

D&D 30 Day Challenge — Day 19

Favorite Monster (Elemental/Plant)

Shambling mound for the win, because it’s an intelligent heap of compost that bludgeons you into submission, then suffocates you to death.

Also, because Man-Thing.

In 3rd Edition D&D’s Savage Species supplement, the shambling mound was a playable race. Seriously, what are you waiting for?

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

D&D 30 Day Challenge — Day 18

 Favorite Monster (Immortal/Outsider)

Rakshasa. Even back to the original AD&D Monster Manual (before they were called outsiders), the rakshasa freaked me out.

I loved the idea of a worldly and civilized fiendish creature (perfectly epitomized in the original MM illustration by the iconic Dave Trampier) that would focus its destructive, carnivorous urges through cunning and malice, as opposed to the chaotic destruction of demons and the otherworldly malevolence of devils. The best expression of that probably came in the Eberron books I worked on for D&D 3e, in which rakshasas played a huge part in the past history — and possible future destruction — of the game world.

Also (though it’s unfortunately not rendered as clearly as it could have been in the Trampier illustration), the rakshasa’s hands are on backwards. That’s pretty badass.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

D&D 30 Day Challenge — Day 17

Favorite Monster (Animal/Vermin)

Monstrous spider. As I suspect is true for an awful lot of people, The Hobbit was the childhood gateway drug that got me mainlining fantasy in later years, and so giant spiders have an awesome sense of nostalgia for me. Plus, I remember that In Search of the Unknown (the first legitimate adventure I ever played) was filled with wandering-monster spider encounters that I still recall with a horrific sense of (virtual) post-traumatic stress. Plus, Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan (the second legitimate adventure I ever played) had a trapdoor spider encounter that I remember nearly killing me. Plus, I can neither confirm nor deny that spiders freak me out in real life, so imagining them the size of horses can reduce me to a quivering mass of panic attack in short order.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)