In your campaign, do you flavor your magic? When a spell is cast is there some attempt to color the casting of it by description. Are they an interconnected style of casting like wisps shadows for necromancers, sparks of energy from an evocation specialists, rainbows of color falling from the illusionists hands. Do you allow the players to build up their own evocative descriptions of their casting of spells or does your table just use the spells as written?

Creating an immersive environment in a game relies on a lot more than just running an interesting plot or using interesting NPC’s, creatures and other threats. To provide an environment that helps the player lose themselves to the visualization it is often best to incorporate as many senses in your descriptions at once. Especially around the idea of magic in a Fantasy campaign as magic is often the backbone to a Fantasy campaign.

I always try to add something to my descriptions of a spell being cast. There is little of interest in simply saying “the mage reaches out and casts web”. Instead flavoring it produces a much more immersive environment like “the mage thrusts out his hand and a wad of sticky strands hurtle forward spinning outward causing a web to emerge as it grasps at your body”. Sure it takes more effort and a few more words but those words are worth so much more to the part of your players mind that is currently trying to visualize the action. It makes it real to them in a sense and they will easily become immersed in it.

But now my challenge is to take this technique and take it a little further. There is much more magic in the world apart from our mages. Take the cleric’s spells and energy channelling powers. How would their gods want this power to appear and manifest? Is it pure light of divinity or the whiff of sulfur from the pit. Rite Publishing’s Secrets of Adventuring offers up a really good level of information for the channelling powers of the cleric giving the appearance, sounds and senses involved as the cleric channels (in fact they make a new class called the Divine Channeler which is pretty damn cool).

But even further from this is the idea of magic items! Does the sword glow when it’s magic is operational? Does the ring clamp onto the finger tightly so that it cannot be removed easily? What about the robe of the archmagi? Such a powerful item surely exhibits some kind of behavior different to the robes of the other mages. perhaps it is self cleaning or powers a stronger aura for the wearer.

Fantasy games almost inevitably have the themes of magic right through them. There are magic poor fantasy worlds and games but there are very few (in fact I can’t think of one) if any fantasy games that do not address magic in the game. My suggestion to you as the GM is to think about how that should manifest in the game. You may want to make it complicated and ritualistic and layer every type of magic with a different appearance and feel or keep it a little more simple and simply have a few standard ideas to run with. But make sure you do do it. It makes the story and game that much more believable and immersive for your players.

Getting your players into a game can be difficult, keeping them playing week to week is another skill. You will have rules lawyers that will want to discuss the specifics of a spells description but that does not mean you can’t flavor it all up with some nice descriptive words first. Get the description right and then look at the detail. That way the more theatrical players will have their minds engaged while the more factual players can concentrate on the nuts and bolts.

A GM has to come to the table armed with a lot of skills. You are a relationship manager, a rules expert, an actor, an improviser and above all else you are the players senses in this imaginary world. Play that up and I guarantee you will make a stronger game and your players will love the approach of game time. Of course it is hard to get right all the time, but just try and with practice you will find this all happening automatically for you. Until next time, Keep rolling!

Mark Knights is  39 year old guy living in a small rural town called Elliott in Tasmania, Australia.  I have been role playing since I was 11 years old playing the original versions of Dungeons and Dragons, MERP, Elric, Dragon Warriors and the like amongst other genre games.  I played D&D 2nd Edition through the 90′s but I ran Earthdawn for my fantasy setting and loved it as a GM.  When 3rd Edition came out for D&D I tried it but found it too heavy on rules.  I ignored the 3.5 edition of DnD in favour of Earthdawn (big mistake) as I thought it was just a money spinner.  When 4th Edition DnD came on my players and I gave it a red hot go but hated what it had dumbed the game down to be.  On a trip to Melbourne to buy some 4E stuff from a hobby store an old mate of mine pointed me at Pathfinder and in a Fantasy setting I have never looked back.

If you are a follower of me on my blog at www.thepathfinderchronicles.com you may wonder what has overcome me this week. I have blogged about very little apart from creating some non player characters for a new game that is to be released (you can actually get the PDF now) to non-Kickstarter backers early in December called the Lords of Gossamer and Shadow written by Jason Durall and published by Rite Publishing. What is it about this game that I am so wound up about? The first thing that caught my eye about this game is it is a random free zone, or a diceless system if you want!

Back in the good old 1990’s a system was released that was revolutionary to the RPG industry in that it was a diceless system. The system was Erick Wujcik’s Amber and it caused quite a stir. Many gamers around me at the time turned their back on the game because they did not think it was  roleplaying. It was collaborative storytelling at best and that was a bad, bad thing – apparently. I have always been someone that is fascinated with new things in RPG’s but with all the gamers around me having no interest I had to pass it by so never quite got my teeth into it.

I am not really sure what happened with Amber in the long run but I do know that the people who gave it a go, loved it. I am always on the lookout for a copy and they never show up. Then one day I am skipping through my Google Plus feed and an interesting image popped up that caught my eye. It is located at the bottom of the Rite Publishing’s page for the game, right down the bottom. It depicts a group of horned monsters in shadow who have just broken down a door and are attacking a group of people (who are all in the light). It is a fantastic little image and I went and investigated it a little bit more.

Turns out that the game was the Lords of Gossamer and Shadow which had been shared around a bit on the feed with the cover of the book as the image. It had interested me, just not enough to click on it by that stage. What I found is this game was considered by some the “spiritual successor” to Amber. In fact it used Amber’s diceless system but applied a new setting to the game. I downloaded the preview of the game and set to reading it.

Diceless got me in to the system and in reality it is not a scary mechanic by any stretch of the imagination. Sure, it takes a lot of the random nature away from the game but you still have stats, powers and the like. There is a set of cohesive rules that work to create the game and guide the GM to provide a fair and equitable game. There are rules for player death, damage, fighting and the like. So what is different? Well largely the decisions of the players are dictated by two things, attributes and tactics. Put two characters in a room where no tactics can come into play and have a contest of attributes, the highest attribute wins every time. However, if the lower attribute character can create an advantage for themselves through their actions it may be a different thing altogether.

The focus is really on  roleplaying in the game. The building of the story and having the GM as an arbiter of the final outcomes from the players actions. A lot of the people I have spoken to believe that it is all by GM caveat but I would argue this after having read the full rules (as a Kickstarter backer I have early access to the rules PDF) that this is not the case. There are rules that are clear on what needs to be done. This game is going to be as much a revolution to me as it was the first time I played FATE or Dungeon World.

While the system has me really interested, it is the setting that has me completely enamored. I have played systems before that promise you can build any type of game or world you want but this game offers a setting where anything, anything can be encountered. The premise is you play a powerful character (in essence they would be considered a God on Earth) that has access to a Grand Stair which has doors attached to it. Through each of these doors is a connected reality that you walk into. That connected reality could in essence be any type of world or space possible, as long as it has a door to travel through. So in essence, I suppose the only reality it can’t represent is one without a door.

This means you can play any style of character from a D&D Dragonborn to a creature from the Hellraiser books because the travellers of the Grand Stair all come from one of these realities where they develop the ability to, or find a key to open the door onto the Grand Stair and then everything changes for them.

So the reason I am truly excited about this? (Sorry but this needs to be capitalized) BIGGEST SANDBOX EVER! A lot of the feel for the game has the characters utilizing weapons of a fantasy type, and there is a reason for this, but they will travel through sci-fi, horror, fantasy and all kinds of genres if you want them to. They will have no idea until they step through the door (not strictly true, there is a power that helps) until they turn the handle.

If you are a fan of Amber, or you want to investigate a new game that has an unbelievable number of narrative possibilities I suggest you keep an eye out for this. I am lead to believe that you can get the PDF from the web page at Rite Publishing so if you can’t wait, check it out! Keep rolling.

Mark Knights is  39 year old guy living in a small rural town called Elliott in Tasmania, Australia.  I have been role playing since I was 11 years old playing the original versions of Dungeons and Dragons, MERP, Elric, Dragon Warriors and the like amongst other genre games.  I played D&D 2nd Edition through the 90′s but I ran Earthdawn for my fantasy setting and loved it as a GM.  When 3rd Edition came out for D&D I tried it but found it too heavy on rules.  I ignored the 3.5 edition of DnD in favour of Earthdawn (big mistake) as I thought it was just a money spinner.  When 4th Edition DnD came on my players and I gave it a red hot go but hated what it had dumbed the game down to be.  On a trip to Melbourne to buy some 4E stuff from a hobby store an old mate of mine pointed me at Pathfinder and in a Fantasy setting I have never looked back.