By Mike Beeman - DECEMBER 1983
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Dungeon Mastering, if you’re good, is not a hobby- It’s a career. The creation and execution of a campaign that will completely engross players and keep them happy and eager to play more is a task on par with finding the Holy Grail. It’s too much work. Besides, it’s not exceedingly profitable.
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So what can we do about it? Quit our jobs, leave school, and make the players support us? Unfortunately, no. What we do is find a way to skimp on the labor without cutting down on the excitement and suspense we work so hard to build up. Every good campaign has five basic elements: continuity, character, competence, creativity and cooperation. If you.re able to maintain all five in your campaign then you.re way ahead of most of us - and you.re probably spending a lot of time dungeoneering (or wishing you were). There are shortcuts to achieving all five of the basic campaign elements that take some of the wear and tear off your overworked gray matter. They are necessarily of a general nature - specific suggestions are obviously impossible - but astute application of these principles can save loads of time and lots of browbeating.
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I. Continuity
Continuity in a campaign is a very complex thing. It is that in a campaign which makes it more than just a series of dungeons, and that which ties all of the dungeons together into a cohesive whole. Many DMs have trouble with continuity. It requires more than a little preparation, often mundane, that is not directly linked to adventuring. A campaign consists of much more than a group of bloodthirsty adventurers going out and killing things, stealing their money and magic, then dropping by the local village only to be off again in a few days. There have to be solid reasons for adventuring above and beyond the joys of fighting and goldmongering. What about revenge? Fear? Altruism? The trick here is to make the characters’ lives much more than an episodic smattering of unrelated activities, like some TV adventure series. You need to give them the continuity and uniformity of a good novel’s protagonists.
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This is all easier said than done. The most important thing to do is to plan in sets of actions rather than dungeon-by-dungeon. Have your dungeons linked together, either directly or indirectly. An excellent example of this is the Against the Giants/Descent into the Depths series of AD&D. modules from TSR, Inc. Each dungeon logically follows its predecessor; the transitions are smooth and the challenges widely varied. Many of TSR.s AD&D modules have been published as sets, and this is not a bad example to follow.
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Serially ordered dungeons are not always feasible, however, so there remains the problem of overall continuity. There are three tricks you can use here. The first is to throw in some mundane personality, event, or item that keeps cropping up when the character makes it back home, such as a wife, an ill mother, robberies in the character .s home, etc. Make the player realize that his character has to live in a world where life goes on even when he isn’t around; even the above-all-the-little-things-in-life heroes have little things going on in their lives. There is also the “old enemy,” that scoundrel who pops in occasionally between adventures to make life difficult for characters. Players love old grudges. One party met up with a nasty fellow called Ollog when everyone was at first level - and they were seventh level before Ollog finally ceased to be a nuisance. Unlike the antihero, which we’ll discuss a bit later, the old enemy is not part of actual adventuring. He is, rather, a byproduct of it who always manages to escape at the last minute.
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The third trick is especially tricky. I call it .the hub of all activity.. You come up with something, be it a magic item, prophecy, or personage, that is the center and cause of a party’s activity throughout most of their adventures. The ‘hub’ of one campaign is a mage called Amathar. The poor adventurers keep running into magic items of his creation, agents in his pay, old acolytes of his - and even the Archmage himself on occasion. They all hate him, but their most powerful magic was created by Amathar for Amathar: he is the hub of all activity. It is very important to keep up a thick veil of mystery about the hub. The interconnections between various adventures should be vague at best, and the players may not realize each piece of the puzzle is related to the whole until several adventures later. Be careful that the hub doesn’t escape your control, because once you start it, it will quickly develop a life of its own. The party must be spiralled toward the hub gradually, over a period of years, and you should let it be known (if necessary) in no uncertain terms that a more direct path to the answer is one leading to sure destruction.
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All three of these devices will spark continuity in the campaign; they let the characters know that their past really affects them as ours does us, and gives the impression of a whole to a life consisting only of fragments. Without that, players find it very difficult to relate to and maintain their characters, and the whole campaign falls apart.
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II. Character
Everybody has to be somebody. Good players will usually freely develop and faithfully play a character’s personality in a roleplaying game, complete with idiotic idiosyncrasies and inexplicable personal preferences. Even so, a good DM will give every character a focal point for his life, or something that will make him feel important or special.
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There are several ways of doing this, but in whichever method you choose, be extremely careful not to force the player into anything. If he feels you.re trying to script the character’s life, the player will lose interest in the game almost immediately. This is a major cause of character demise or “player dropout” in AD&D gaming. Many players are perfectly content to role-play a hero’s companion, and when you try to make them become heroes, those players get upset. Players have been known to build their characters’ personae around the fact that the characters always tried to be heroes but failed, and then the heroes came gallantly to their rescue. That’s okay; it’s the players’ game. Let them play it as they will.
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For those fledgling heroes, though, it is a great help to have something to grasp and mold their personalities around. Four options are immediately apparent: the quest, the magic item, the anti-hero and the destiny.
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The quest is by far the least desirable of these options. There are several reasons for this, not the least of which is a quest’s temporal nature. Quests should be accomplished fairly quickly; if not, they become tedious and boring. There is also the question of free will. If a character is quested, he loses much of his free will. His destiny is dictated by the quest and he is powerless to change it, which irritates the player to no end.
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The other options are much more attractive. The magic item is the best. It offers the greatest variety of adventures that can be built around it and at the same time increases rather than restricts a player character’s freedom. One of Amathar’s creations in the previously described campaign served quite handily in this regard. An elven magic-user character was in a party with three paladins, and was getting something of an inferiority complex. He didn’t fight well, and by the time he got his spells off the paladins had either destroyed or subdued whatever it was he was magicking. Well, he came into the possession of an item called the Strange of Amathar, which changed all that. He is now the most powerful member of the party (and, accordingly, the most beset with problems) and has saved the entire group on numerous occasions.
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It is necessary that the item be an original creation, with a background and potential befitting an artifact, so be very wary of its potential for upsetting the game balance. The item might increase or decrease in power as the character rises in level, or make its usage nigh as costly to the wielder as the victim. Charged items usually won’t work for this purpose; they.re too temporary, making them very ineffective unless they have absorption capabilities (e.g. staff of the magi) that recharge them.
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The anti-hero is especially effective against fighters, although in my campaign two rival magic-users once destroyed half a city. You can create an incredibly nasty NPC that, without apparent provocation, devotes his life to making a player character miserable. The anti-hero torments, chides, and humiliates the character with a constant stream of affronts that may include assaulting and kidnapping family members and retainers, laying traps for the PC, spreading rumors about the PC, and so on. Unlike the ‘old enemy’ described above, this nemesis’ offenses are constant and precede any actual adventuring to the land in which the antihero resides. It should be several game years before the character can effectively challenge his adversary, and the hatred between characters should be very real and very intense on both parts. Remember not to get carried away; which it is very easy to do. Make the character’s pride the primary target, but don’t humiliate the PC to the point where the player simply quits. Allow the character some retribution occasionally to keep him going.
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The destiny is the hardest of all to DM, the most complex to prepare for, and the hardest to justify. But players love it. Basically, the DM creates a set of prophecies surrounding a character or an item that character possesses, and then administrates its fulfillment. The prophecies must be vague and leave plenty of room for error because - I guarantee it - someone will do something that threatens to invalidate the entire thing. Once upon a time a PC in my campaign was prophesied to slay a pit fiend in an epic battle. He had to be a paladin, right? Wrong. He was a magic-user with a measly 28 hit points who, suddenly and with much bravado, leapt upon the devil and magic jarred it, magic resistance and saving throw notwithstanding. A good variation on the destiny theme is the ‘eternal champion’ concept in which a great hero is continually reborn in new bodies - one of them a PC. What player wouldn’t love being compared with Elric, Hawkmoon, Corum, and their ilk? You need to be very careful with this kind of character history manipulation. One slip can take all the mystery out of the campaign, and players love finding that one tiny hole in your plans.
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III. Competence
If you feel inclined to Dungeon Master, there are only two things you really need to be a pretty good one, aside from an active imagination. The first, of infinite import, is a working knowledge of the rules. You don’t have to be a ‘textpert’ capable of rattling off the stats of every single monster in both the Monster Manual and the FIEND FOLIO. Tome: just know enough so that you know what you’re doing. A player at OrcCon last year boasted of killing six Tiamats and three Bahamuts. Anyone who has read the books knows this is impossible.
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The second requirement of a competent DM is a sense of the dramatic. A Dungeon Master has to know, often instinctively, how to build suspense and climax it for maximum effect. He has to lend variety and substance to as many as a hundred NPCs, perhaps more, in every session. A DM is basically a playright for characters in need of a play. If the play is found lacking, the players will take their characters elsewhere. This is not to say that only good actors and good writers can be good DMs. We’ve all read enough and seen enough movies to have developed some sense of drama, but it takes time and practice to mature any talent. Simply keep the game moving at all times while you.re at the playing table; don’t let frequent digressions or breaks to look up the rules bore your players. If you’re desperately unsure of something, then look it up, but don’t be afraid to make some snap rulings. If you’re wrong, there’s usually no harm done. You should always have vital statistics (i.e. HP, AC, #At, etc.) written into the key. If, as play continues, you find an ‘official’ rule inconvenient or awkward, then by all means develop your own way of handling the situation. Remember that .the play’s the thing.. No one grades your adherence to the rule books - in fact, I know of one group that plays AD&D adventures without dice.
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If anything at all helps to keep the game moving and saves work, it is the efficient and frequent use of playing aids. You’d be surprised (or would you?) how many people spend money on aids and then don’t use them. If you.ve got it, use it. A DM designing a campaign needs all the help he can get. Published modules are invaluable as both time-savers and gap-fillers, but never run a module straight off the shelf. Adapt it to fit your party’s personality. Most modules can stand (and some need) great amounts of revision. For example, TSR.s module L1, The Secret of Bone Hill, has as its primary mission the cleaning out of a mansion infested with humanoids and undead. The party I ran it on spent scant minutes in the mansion: their primary mission was to assassinate the Duke of Restenford. Although the module was excellently written, it didn’t fit the personality of the party. Never be afraid to alter anything if you think it’ll work better than the original presentation.
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For those AD&D gamers just getting started, some playing aids are indispensible. Nothing will speed up a game more than a set of DM screens, be they homemade or storebought. You may want to make a supplemental screen for thief abilities, equipment cost, and spell charts, and wandering-monster tables. If you need a world to DM, there are many available at gaming shops. You’ll also need a city. Judges Guild has several on the market; for general use City State of the World Emperor is the best. If you operate out of a particularly unruly campaign land, you may opt for City State of the Invincible Overlord, wherein trolls and rangers share tables in taverns. Without these, or comparable works of your own design, your campaign will be a pale shadow of what it could be.
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IV. Creativity
Creativity is the cornerstone of AD&D gaming. If a campaign is to survive, it can’t be a repetitive series of hack-and-slay forays into the underworld. There must be a wide variety of settings, goals, and obstacles to maintain player interest. A good hack-and-slay dungeon is by far the most popular type - I know a ninth-level paladin who endures his expeditions into the Nine Hells only if he can go off fighting orcs back home - but these dungeons can get very dull very fast.
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How can you make it easier to be creative? That’s simple: plagiarize. Plagiarism is perhaps the Dungeon Master’s most valuable tool next to his own imagination. I do not mean you should take your favorite fantasy book and convert it into a dungeon, which is very easy and appallingly common. All that will result is a lifeless rerun or an unmitigated disaster. Players never do what you expect them to do, and if you try to force them into a plot of your own devising, they’ll do everything they can to make life for you unliveable. They won’t do it on purpose, of course, but they’ll manage.
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When you feel the need to plagiarize, only glean a few of the best ideas from the book or movie, and work them into an original or modified setting or plot. This is called .creative plagiarism.. Your job is to set up the general setting and plot, not dictate all the action. A series of campaign adventures can be a plagiarist’s paradise - one I know of took its basic plot and setting from Stephen Donaldson’s first Covenant series with a few items from the movie The Vikings and Roger Zelazny’s Dilvish the Damned to confuse things. Players love romping in places and with people they’ve read about, but you have to maintain enough mystery and suspense to keep them guessing about what is going to happen next. Even though several players in the above campaign were familiar with the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, they never found an easy solution to their problems. Keeping the challenge alive is the key to good plagiarism. Your own original creation will often be your best, and you should never be content to let others do most of the work. Keep the juices flowing, but when you do run into dry spells, don’t worry about tapping another’s imagination.
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V. Cooperation
This is it, folks: the ultimate work-saver. Share the chores with somebody else. You can’t do it all alone, believe me. If your players call every day to ask, “Can we play today?” and if you have as much trouble saying “no” as I do, then you’ll soon be DMing completely off the top of your head, trying to referee half-formed adventures, and eventually spoiling the hard-won continuity of your campaign. Sharing the work will take a lot of pressure off you, both as creator and administrator. It’ll give you a chance to play, and you do need to play to evolve properly as a DM. When one of two or more participants serves as Dungeon Master for a certain session, it’ll give the other(s) a little time to relax and prepare what comes next.
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There are two ways to accomplish this. You and the other DMs can each run campaigns independent of one another that occur in different time-space continuums, or you can share the same campaign. The first option allows unlimited freedom for all DMs. They can alter the laws and features of their respective universes at will without endangering the other’s work. The problem is in the human element. The players will undoubtedly prefer one campaign to the other and want to play it more and more frequently. This may lead to a group split, which is something no one wants.
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The other option allows more interaction and idea-swapping between the Dungeon Masters, but it has problems of its own that fit neatly under the heading of consistency. It is imperative that consistency in the obstacle/reward ratio be kept. If one of you has a penchant for giving away megamagic and other DMs prefer the judicious and considered use of magic, then there will be a few problems, to put it mildly, The two (or more) of you should work to become acclimated to each others’ gaming style and preference, so that problems will eventually work themselves out.
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Another thing to watch for is rule uniformity. The most logical thing to do is stick to the books: no new character classes, no newly revised combat procedures, no new weapon proficiency rules, however ‘official ‘ they may be, without the consent of the other DM or DMs and your players. If all of them fully understand the changes, then go ahead and use them. Don’t make any major changes in procedure without consulting your comrades. If you keep up a consistent approach to the game, you’ll find the transitions between Dungeon Masters perfectly natural.
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Since cooperation is such a vital part of any successful campaign, here’s a word of advice. Only play in campaigns with people you like. This does not mean people you can tolerate - tolerance wears thin in the heat of the game. If you genuinely like the people you play with, everything will be that much easier. Of course, playing with new people is a great way to make friends (especially at tournaments and conventions), but for day-to-day campaign play, keep it close. Cutting down on your work load does not compromise your ability or your effectiveness as a Dungeon Master. The purpose of AD&D gaming is enjoyment and escapist entertainment. Let it stay that way. DMing can easily slip from the realm of gaming to the all-too-real world of work, and when that happens it’s easier than not to forget the whole thing. You obviously take pride in what you do, or you wouldn’t do it. The feeling you get when characters barely make it out of your labyrinth alive, struggling to haul up their just rewards, is unequalled in all of gaming, and that feeling can only be achieved if you practice these five principles in your campaign. That is never easy to do. The tricks of the trade offered here do not free you from the responsibilities of creation. Used properly, they will make creation much easier and emancipate you from much of the tedium and needless drudgery that accompanies creation. The success of your campaign rests entirely on your shoulders; it just shouldn’t take so much work. After all, playing games is supposed to be fun, right?
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