Whether you're creating a homebrew setting and lore for a D&D campaign or writing a novel creating a lore bible is the single most useful thing you can do.
It's not really that much work and it will save you a lot of work in the future. You will forget story details, character names and backstories, places, and dates. It's just gonna happen. Help your future self. Create a lore bible.
Without a lore bible you're gonna have a much more difficult search for the info you want. With a lore bible, it's so much easier. You'll see Brennan Lee Mulligan searching on his laptop for a name, place or date on D20 and Critical Role. And you can hear Murph doing the same on Naddpod when someone (usually Emily) asks for someone's name.
Create a glossary in alphabetical order and just keep adding to it with people, places, and things. Create a doc that lists the important dates and summarize the events, who was there and why it's significant. Create a chart that outlines the sociopolitical hierarchy. Create docs outlining any religions and their hierarchies. Get it all together in one place. Add to it diligently. And when you forget something, you'll know exactly where to go to find your answer.
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I enjoyed a video on being a player at the table recently and wanted to share it with you all.
It goes a bit long, I feel, but at the heart of it, for me, is that a D&D character shouldn’t just be a backstory stapled to a stat block.
They should be an engine for play.
A person with needs, contradictions, blind spots, fears, assumptions, wants, and opinions that will actually form attachment to the world, story, NPCs, Players (and their characetrs) and, of course, sometimes collide with the world and with the party.
The best character choices are the ones that give the table something to work with.
Know what role you’re playing in the story in the dramatic sense. Are you the skeptic? The heart? The moral compass? The chaos goblin? The truth seeker? The person who says the ugly thing out loud? The one who makes bad decisions for interesting reasons?
Your task is to bring something alive to the table that can be challenged, tempted, wounded, proven wrong, and transformed.
It touches on a misstep I see a lot of players make: arriving with every answer pre-written, or an end-game expectation. I believe you'll see better results if you leave blank spaces.
Let the campaign teach you who your character is.
Track what your character believes. Track who they trust. Track who they resent. Track what scares them, what they’re avoiding, what they keep pretending not to want. Hell, do yourself a favor and jot some notes you observe in what the other players do here for their characters and they'll LOVE that too.
Because that’s where the actual characters in your campaign live. Not in the backstory or the expectations you set away from the table, but in the moments of pressure, development, change and its impact, and how it all feels during play.
The trick is to make choices that are strong enough to matter, but flexible enough to evolve.
Think of the game you're playing and consider this: Your character is loaded dice. Roll them and let the moment shape what they become.
The following tips and advice for running D&D games comes from years of research, hundreds of interviews, and thousands of surveys from both new and experienced DMs.
Be careful at 1st level. 1st level characters are extremely vulnerable, more than at any other level in the game. Consider giving 1st level characters five extra hit points. Don't run more creatures in a battle than there are characters and run only monsters with a challenge rating of 1/4 or below. Level the characters up to 2nd level quickly. The Starter Set and Essentials Kit adventures can be lethal if a DM isn't careful.
How to Play Dungeons & Dragons: SlyFlourish.com
This is just one of a handful of *extremely* helpful tips for anyone who is new to D&D, or is looking to refocus themselves as a DM.
Overhauling Exploration with the Illuminated Room System
Artsource
Despite playing D&D for over 20 years, every so often I'll encounter a bit of DM advice that completely changes the way I run my games. When it happens, it often feels like I've discovered a way we were always SUPPOSED to be playing, solving a problem that I'd had for years and sending me into a rage spiral about why no one seemed to figure this out back when I was first learning the game.
Lo and behold, two of my favourite online DM channels happen to hit upon the same idea mere months apart.
TLDR: To improve the efficiency and clarity of our exploration based gameplay, we should borrow from videogame UI design which makes it easy for players to know what to do by highlighting things players can interact with. From there, escape room design takes over, as interaction reveals new information, challenges, and puzzles.Â
More ideas about how to use this system (and my own ideas about spicing it up) under the cut.
Again, I cannot overstate how much this technique has overhauled my games, improving everything from dungeoncrawls to mystery investigations. It’s succinct, it’s direct, it’s easy to both design around and run at the table. It helps focus the party on what’s been prepped without restricting their options, and it’s even communicable to other games like MOTW.Â
One of the things I like most about it is that it’s scalable: while the system works to describe individual rooms, you can also use it to describe entire floors in larger structures, or even regions of wilderness for far ranging adventures. You can even mix and match, detailing the exterior region around the dungeon as the party searches for an entrance before zooming in to smaller and smaller areas.Â
Tips and tricks:
Since this system is all about revealing information, it’s important you know what that information is pointing to. What’s your party’s goal in the dungeon? Are they exploring ? Give them information about the background of the area? Are they looking for something specific? Hints and clues towards its actual location (though they may need to connect the dots). You can also use this hidden information to forecast future threats, or tempt them onto exploration sidetracks. Â
On that same topic, you can give your dungeons a sense of life and history by connecting a few of these points of interest into their own narrative threads. Escalate the threat of a haunted tomb by leaving clues about a group of thieves who tried to delve it beforehand. Play up the chaos and comedy of an absentminded mage by leaving his research notes scattered about. Players are completionist by nature, and humanizing the lore will only make them want to know the endings even more.Â
MIx minor hazards into your investigation to keep things interesting. A chance for minor damage or afflictions every couple of “rooms” will keep the party on edge without punishing them for their curiosity. You can also through a more major threat in there (room level trap, lurking combat encounter, debilitating curse), but in this instance the “highlighting” should give the party a chance of not getting ambushed.Â
I like to pair the illuminated room system with my framework for random encounters, having every “round” of exploration adding a unit of time. I also let my players spend time to “brute force” any of the failed rolls they might have suffered, (fully tossing a room looking for a single journal, trying every combination on a safe etc.)
You can even have illuminated room exploration in the aftermath of the battle, mixing clues dropped by the party’s foes with things that were already in the area. This is a great way to double up during the dungeon design process, designing a setpiece combat arena as a place of investigation and viceversa.Â
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A magic or mundane artifact generates an effect harmful to the PCs, but it is guarded by the monster's minions.
The encounter's setting starts to collapse during the battle, and all the combatants will need to escape.
A boss monster has a 'second form' that activates mid-way through the battle.
Traps are placed throughout the battlefield, and characters must be wary of them.
The PCs must complete a ritual while fending off attacks from the enemy.
The encounter area is a series of cliffs or platforms, forcing characters to jump around and risk falling, possibly into a pit, water, or lava.
There is a monster that uses the blink spell or tunneling to avoid attacks between its turns.
A minor enemy has the ability to summon or call for reinforcements every round.
There are three sides, not two, battling in this encounter.
A disastrous environmental effect, such as an avalanche, wildfire, or earthquake, occurs in the area, dealing damage and forcing the combatants apart.
An anti-magic pulse affects some areas of the battlefield periodically, suppressing spells and magical items when it is active.
The enemies are shockingly weak and easily defeated, but the PCs' goal isn't here -- the treasure chest is a mimic, or their princess is in another castle.
hi! what do you use as a guide or generally as help in order to organize the dnd campaign? (apart from the official stuff)
hi! i exclusively use google drive to plot my campaigns. i have sort of two main documents: my overall planning document, and my session planning document.
master doc.
so, for example, in a campaign i ran which was one hundred 3-4 hour sessions over .... nearly two years (one of my 3 players who are on here may correct me), i had one master doc for the whole campaign in which was all of the major lore and information i needed to build a story. here's what the subsections looked like:
now those sections could be massive or could be tiny, depending on how relevant they were to the plot, but they were a place for me to dump any and all thoughts i had relating to certain threads of the campaign. some even linked to other small documents when i felt they were getting to unwieldy for my master doc:
"the players" tab was a fairly important one where i kept track of npcs. sometimes, i would colour code the npcs based on faction as a quick reference, which was especially useful in the linked 'empire of masks' doc because that was for a part of the storyline where the players got involved in a civil war and i needed an easy way to keep track of who was on what side:
session planning doc.
so moving on from the master planning doc (and switching to a different campaign) i then had my session planning doc, which was a single google doc for each act, with sub-docs for each individual session beneath them + lore docs for relevant areas:
that first doc, "act ii" would be my overall act planning doc, and was purposefully fairly messy and included thoughts and important lore bits that didn't really fit anywhere else:
the session documents, however, were my bread and butter. this was where i had all my information for the upcoming session, my summary of the session beforehand, the date, etc.
that's just a section, the whole document is longer and covers all the areas the group could be likely to interact with. at this stage the campaign was fairly established, and i am lucky enough to DM for 8 players, so things are always moving, and i have a lot of trust in my players to explore what i've set out. i've found over the years playing with this particular group, i don't need so many obvious plot devices once the campaign is up and running, because the players are fairly proactive and will hunt things down.
other organising.
the rest of my documents are fairly straight forward. above are my usual folders within a campaign. i keep track of all letters i've written and received from characters, i have a screen that i built that connects to my laptop so i can project character images and maps to the table. i can go more in depth on anything above if you need, but i hope this answers what you were looking for! i've tried using programs like oblivion and i've also used a handwritten journal before too, but me and my 1000+ google docs are best friends at this stage and i find this organisation system works really really well for me after about 8 years of dming almost once a week.
Things I've Learned About DM-ing from Brennan Lee Mulligan and Aabria Iyengar
(In no particular order)
Players only follow bread crumbs if the floor is made of bread
Just because the party doesn't follow a plot point doesn't mean it's dead. You're developing it for later.
Consequences maketh man (or rather: character)
Don't be afraid to make your players cry, but do cry with them and hold their hand after
Presentation is 75% of DMing. If that's your costume or makeup or your body language and tone, put your best face forward. Your players will follow suit.
Build the world with your players. They'll love the world more for it.
Be your players' biggest fan. Cheer them on when no one else will. Applaud them when they kill your big bads. Cry with them when they lose their character. The story isn't possible without both of you.
