Last time we came up with some resources to create NPCs quickly on the fly. We generated a list of names, found a list of traits, and located a list of motivations. Why don’t we use those resources to generate some NPCs?

Like with everything else, context is important. So knowing where these characters are going to appear is the first part of the puzzle. But usually I won’t know which path the characters might take, so I may create a few NPCs ahead of time and leave some random elements to do them on the fly if necessary.

For instance, if my PCs are exploring an urban setting and go visit a general store, they may want to chat with the shopkeeper.

First I’ll roll a d12 (or use Random.org) to select a name from the list I created earlier. I rolled a 7, which is… Blizzard. Not one of my favorites on the list, but we’ll go with it to see where it leads.

Next, I’ll try and use the Fiction Writer’s Mentor list of traits and Random.org (works just as well as randomly picking something by hand or via dice) to come up with a random number between 1 and 447. I get 360, which is… Sensitive.

And lastly I’ll roll another d24 on the list of motivations from Alric, which is… Honesty.

Somehow from that combination of properties I see Blizzard as a younger, sensitive girl working on the shop and being brutally honest with customers. And voila, I have a NPC I can work with.

Let’s try another one. Maybe our PCs are on the road and run across a traveling caravan going the other direction. They decide to ask if they hit any trouble on the road ahead. So I’ll need a caravan guard to materialize…

• Name: (roll a 6) Tai’sul
• Trait: (roll a 331) Religious
• Motivation: (roll a 21) Service

I can definitely work with that. Our man Tai’sul is a religious man in the service of his faith escorting a high-ranking church member from one location to another. Perhaps the high-ranking priest is on a tour of temples and churches in the area making sure they’re being held to the standards of their faith. But a personality for our churchly guard is easy to come up with and helped me come up with a reason for the caravan as well.

Let’s do one more for good measure… Perhaps our PCs want to talk to the religious figure being escorted by our friend Tai’sul.

• Name: (roll a 3) Gwilherm
• Trait: (roll a 419) Unconcerned
• Motivation: (roll a 1) Achievement (doesn’t really work, so I roll again) (roll a 20) Religion/Faith

When Tai’sul goes to speak with his master in the wagon, he comes back quickly asking if any of the PCs are among the faithful of their gods. If so, Father Gwilherm will speak with the PCs and express that it was his guards’ duty to protect him from any incidents that may have occurred on the road. If they should die, their spirits will be well taken care of by their creators. Why should he care for any trouble? What is ordained is ordained… And if there are no faithful among the PCs, he declines to speak with them at all and urges his retinue to continue on their journey.

Again, the name, trait, and motivation came together not only to help define the NPC but guide the parameters of the encounter.

Brian “Fitz” Fitzpatrick is a Software Engineer who manages (or is that mangles) Game Knight Reviews and tinkers with writing game materials via his Moebius Adventures imprint. When he’s not writing about gaming, he’s actually gaming or at least thinking about gaming in some capacity. During the non-writing, non-gaming time he’s likely trying to keep up with his wife and two daughters or wrangling code for a living!

In any campaign, sandbox or not, the world has to be filled with people coming and going to give it life. Otherwise our PCs are just wandering around talking to themselves or a bunch of monsters. And yes, monsters can be fun (I love a good dungeon crawl), but the roleplaying aspect of our hobby comes from more than combat.

So are NPCs a dime a dozen? It wouldn’t seem so. When I was GMing regularly I had a list of names that I could grab something from when my players decided they needed to visit with someone. But a name isn’t usually enough. After all, who is “Bob” really? He works at the blacksmith down on the corner, but what does he do? What’s his personality like? How does he dress? And that’s when I always got a bit drowned in details. We could go into detail on each and every character in the “world” the characters inhabit, but what does that mean?

Details it turns out are sometimes unnecessary. I find I really like the “One Sentence NPC” approach that Johnn Four pioneered at the Roleplaying Tips site (you can see the issue with the article here), but I want to streamline it a little.

All I really need is a name, a personality trait, and a motivation. The rest sort of handles itself in the process of roleplaying the NPC.

Let’s start with the names. I prefer to have a list prepared that I can just randomly select from, cross off so I don’t use it again, and move on. So let’s generate a list. There are a number of terrific random generators I use regularly:

• Behind the Name offers all sorts of categories to help guide your name generation. You could specify the “Breton” and “Hillbilly” categories, select “Masculine” as the gender, click “Generate a Name” and instantly have one pop up. I got Corentin, Yanick, and Gwilherm, which are all fun.
• The Fantasy Name Generator from Samuel Stoddard at Rinkworks is one I use the most. It has two options – Simple and Advanced. I usually just go with Simple and click “Generate Names” to create a block I can pull from. The Advanced side requires a bit of ramp-up to learn how to use, but you have a ton of customizable options available. We’ll grab three “simple” names here – Denad, Alet, and Tai’sul.
• Seventh Sanctum has a huge number of available options for names (and many many other things). In this case, I like the “Fantasy Name Extreme Generator”, which definitely offers some over-the-top names for your list. After generating 25 names, I’ll grab Blizzard, Flora, and Zeal.
• And last but not least there’s the Fantasy Name generator at Chaotic Shiny. Like Seventh Sanctum, Chaotic Shiny has a ton of fun generators to play with, but the name tool works great. Tell it how many you want and what gender and it chugs away giving me Kad, Traska, and Kailin.

Obviously there are many more out there. Use your Google-fu to find a few and let me know if you find any other cool ones. 🙂

Editor’s Note: And don’t forget Brian’s own License Plates as Name Generators article here for great name ideas.

So here’s the name list we’ve put together. It works well for a random d12 roll at first or just the random stab with a finger:

• Corentin
• Yanick
• Gwilherm
• Denad
• Alet
• Tai’sul
• Blizzard
• Flora
• Zeal
• Kad
• Traska
• Kailin

Once we have our names, we need to find some traits. Again, there are quite a few online references to choose from or existing supplements to pick up.

Luckily Johnn Four’s 3 Line PCs book offers just such a list. There’s 1000 traits in the list to choose from. Randomly roll a d1000 or use the phonebook method of scrolling to a page and putting your finger down. Everything from Able & Brutish to Young & Zany. Just pick one.

Or if you are looking for a list on the web, here are a few I found:

• Fiction Writers’ Mentor has a good list of almost 450 broad terms to use.
• The Character Trait Descriptive Adjectives and Other Words list has a bunch of generic terms that could easily be used.
• The Hypertext d20 SRD has a solid random trait table (d100, each described with a bit of text) that can easily be adapted to other systems.
• The Pathfinder SRD site has a list broken down into numerous categories such as Combat, Faith, Magic, Social, etc. Some of them are quite entertaining and most if not all could be adapted.

And lastly we need some form of motivation. Why drives these characters to do whatever it is they do or behave the way they do? Here again are a few resources on the web with lists of motivations…

• If you haven’t explored it, the TVTropes.org site is a treasure trove of plots and other story tidbits. They have a great list of common tropes used to motivate characters that should offer some interesting story ideas.
• And Alric @ The RPG Athenaeum has a great article written back in 2009 that offers 24 different motivations to figure out what the character thinks is important.

So with these three broad, random lists in hand why don’t we create a few NPCs? Next time we’ll do just that. 🙂

Brian “Fitz” Fitzpatrick is a Software Engineer who manages (or is that mangles) Game Knight Reviews and tinkers with writing game materials via his Moebius Adventures imprint. When he’s not writing about gaming, he’s actually gaming or at least thinking about gaming in some capacity. During the non-writing, non-gaming time he’s likely trying to keep up with his wife and two daughters or wrangling code for a living!

Like most GMs and writers, I’m always looking for inspiration. Sometimes it comes from within. Sometimes you have to go looking for it. And one place it occurred to me to look for such inspiration is in movie trailers.

I’m sure you’re wondering why use movie trailers. But if you think about it, they’re the perfect vehicle for getting plots, settings, and characters. In about 60-120 seconds, you get the rough outline for the setup of the story. Plenty of plot points to snag quickly. And you don’t get bogged down in all the details as you do when you watch the whole thing. Plus, and this is the key, without all the context your mind is more free to interpret what it sees and put things together in different ways.

Sure, you could watch the whole movie. Or the whole television program. Or read the whole book. But it’s too much information. You might get a few plot points here or there, but it’s a different beast entirely. For our purposes we want broad strokes and nothing more. The details just get in the way.

The steps are simple. Pick a trailer. Watch the trailer. Take some notes about key elements. Ponder the notes and turn them into an adventure idea.

Let’s start with an easy one. Take a trailer like the one for the movie Devil’s Pass (watch it here). I’m not a huge horror fan, but I find that just about any trailer can be broken into story elements around which a story could be built.

In this case, you get a few high points…

1. A past expedition went to explore a mountain pass and disappeared
2. A modern expedition is going to recreate the expedition /li>
3. They arrive in the valley (snowy or otherwise) that the past expedition was heading to
4. They get strange readings on their equipment
5. They decide they don’t want to hang around, but it’s nearing nightfall and it’s too dangerous to leave
6. In the night something/someone triggers an avalanche that they get hurt in but survive
7. In the morning they are attacked by a group of people
8. They find refuge in an old cave system or underground facility
9. But something is in there with them that’s decidedly not friendly

Doesn’t this sound like a solid adventure for your PCs? I don’t even really have to massage it much.

Though the movie appears to be set largely in a wintery location in the mountains, it could easily be moved to just about any location. Perhaps somewhere isolated like a dark wooded area or a desert. Or even somewhere in space… a distant world, shipwreck, or whatever. Just about any group with a secret agenda might have a hidden location they’d rather not have someone bring to light could be the antagonists… And perhaps they have something truly evil in store.

As with all ideas, your imagination is the only limitation.

So you don’t think this is a one trick pony, let’s take another trailer… This time for the upcoming Jobs movie about Steve Jobs (watch it here). Not a movie I plan on seeing. And yes, this one is a little tougher to translate into something usable. 🙂

We can break it down into a few points:

1. Jobs goes to college
2. Jobs drops out of college
3. Gets involved with girl
4. Gets involved with Wozniac, who creates Apple I
5. Businessman gets involved
6. Apple gets big
7. Jobs and Apple have fight
8. Jobs fired
9. Jobs finds himself again
10. Jobs back at Apple making history

Let’s change it slightly and go with two wizards who went into business together to produce a better quality of magical items. Quality over variety or production. But when one wanted to change the company philosophy towards increasing production by making a deal with dark forces, the two parted ways. Years later, the wizard who left returns to find an empire in ruins because his partner had sold out to a demon. The second wizard asks the PCs to help find and stop his old friend, now corrupted beyond saving… Can they save the empire? Can they save his friend?

Not quite as clean a conversion, but I think I ended up with something usable. In fact, I may start doing a weekly challenge over at my Moebius Adventures blog to have folks submit movie trailers for me to try and massage into adventure plots!

What can YOU come up with? Pick a random movie trailer on the Internet and see! Be sure to put your adventure plots and the movie trailer link into your comments – we’d love to read them!

Brian “Fitz” Fitzpatrick is a Software Engineer who manages (or is that mangles) Game Knight Reviews and tinkers with writing game materials via his Moebius Adventures imprint. When he’s not writing about gaming, he’s actually gaming or at least thinking about gaming in some capacity. During the non-writing, non-gaming time he’s likely trying to keep up with his wife and two daughters or wrangling code for a living!

My wife is a veterinarian who helps out with a local organization called Street Petz in Colorado Springs, CO. She and her volunteers go out once a week to help out the homeless population downtown and their pets by providing food, vaccines, and whatever supplies they can. She also gives blankets, water, socks, some food, and whatever she can to the homeless themselves. I’ve met a few of them and many are kind folks just trying to get by. They are people and deserve our help if it’s within our power to provide it.

But it’s left me wondering about the many homeless populations that must exist in fantasy RPGs and why we don’t usually see them appear in our campaigns and adventures.

Take a common scenario we see again and again. Bandits. Marauders. Barbarians. Swoop into a village, take what they want, and set fire to the rest. If you’re lucky enough to survive, you’re likely hurt, your family is dead or missing, and your home is destroyed. Or take the Robin Hood scenario. Good men, women, and families taxed to the brink of starvation and death flee for their lives as their homes, livestock, and more are possessed in lieu of payment. Again, the strong take what they want from the weak and leave them to fend for themselves. What happens to these people? Where do they go?

If you’re in an urban environment, imagine the devastation from a simple fire burning out of control through a group of houses. Just like today, those people may lose loved ones, but more than likely they lose their property and homes, with nowhere to turn for help. Again, I’m wondering where these folks go. Does anybody help them? Do they get justice or help in any form?

So let’s take a look at a few possible angles from which to tackle this question.

First, if it’s a wilderness setting, there’s always the camping alternative. Imagine a hidden camp area where folks gather, share resources, and work together to survive. Would these people be fearful of outsiders? You bet. Whether you represent the law or not, they’re going to be reluctant to let anyone in to take advantage of whatever they have left. Even if all they have left is a shred of dignity, they’re going to hold onto that and likely fight for it to the bitter end.

I could see an adventure where the PCs are asked to investigate some bandit activity and come across a burned out village. They might track the survivors down to one of these camps and ask some questions to determine who the bandits were or where they came from. Then they could track the bandits down and remove the threat so the villagers could return and try to rebuild their lives if they chose to do so.

Or your PCs may simply run across some displaced individuals along the road. Where did they come from? Can the PCs help? Where are they going?

Second, maybe we’re dealing with a rural setting. Farms and ranches. Sometimes a kind family will take in those affected by tragedy and help them out for a time. They may even be integrated into their daily lives, helping out with chores and jobs, or building new lives with their benefactors. Like in the camp situation, bonds will be formed and they will become protective of one another if things are going well. Or if they aren’t, they’re likely to turn out the troublemakers quickly.

Imagine an investigation into a series of deaths in the vicinity that all started when a family farm was decimated by wild creatures. The PCs may have to talk to many local farms or ranches in the area to figure out where any survivors went and then see if one of them perhaps caused the initial incident and the following murders. I can see resistance to the idea that “one of their own” would do such a thing…

Third, let’s look at an urban setting like a town or city. Larger civilized population centers typically have one or more spots where homeless tend to congregate. Unless the local police force is really draconian about their policies, homeless may group near bridges, drainage areas, parks, or even on church grounds. A homeless population may form a community in the wilderness beside a town or city. And again, most will try to keep to themselves and avoid trouble if at all possible.

An adventure idea here may revolve around an arsonist destroying homes in town and forcing people onto the streets. Can the PCs determine where the survivors are? Will the survivors give them any clues they may have? And can they stop the madness before more people become homeless?

Though all of these ideas are fairly dark and gritty, each offers some interesting ways to work ethical and moral dilemmas into a campaign world. Will a local government help or hinder an investigation? What are the laws like? How corrupt are any local officials? Plus, you have plenty of room to make the homeless in your worlds a part of the tapestry, with plenty of colorful characters with dark pasts and potential links to other adventures…

Brian “Fitz” Fitzpatrick is a Software Engineer who manages (or is that mangles) Game Knight Reviews and tinkers with writing game materials via his Moebius Adventures imprint. When he’s not writing about gaming, he’s actually gaming or at least thinking about gaming in some capacity. During the non-writing, non-gaming time he’s likely trying to keep up with his wife and two daughters or wrangling code for a living!

A few weeks ago we had a “Supermoon” event and it strangely made me ponder the use of moons in fantasy campaigns. Beyond the fact that ancient Greeks once thought that the full moon’s pull affected the fluids of the brain like it does the tides and the strange correlation between a full moon and increased police, fire, and emergency activity (talk to any fireman, police officer, or ER nurse for details), I’m pretty sure I’m not going to go all wolf-man any time soon… But here are a few ideas for how you might be able to use the moon (or moons) in your campaign.

1. Tides

In my years of gaming, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the tides show up in any meaningful way in an adventure except for some of the recent modules from Kobold Press. But if you live on the coast, they’re a literal fact of nature. Why not use them in your stories?

• A sand bridge or other submerged feature may only appear at low tide to allow access to a small island off shore. (See “Sand Bridge at Low Tide” @ TVTropes.org for some examples.)
• A cave in the rocks that serves as the entrance to an ancient temple or hidden treasure trove in a weatherbeaten cove and is only accessible at low tide for a short time.
• In a small boat at high tide might be the only safe way to get to an alcove inaccessible from above along an ocean-facing rock wall.
• High tide might wash ashore clues to an ancient (or recent) shipwreck, including bodies and debris.

And if you have more than a single moon for your campaign world, I’m sure you could plot out extremely low tides where the remains of ancient civilizations are exposed on the ocean floor (think H.P. Lovecraft) or extremely high tides when coastal cities have to batten down the hatches or be swept away.

2. Lycanthropy

Everybody likes a good werewolf story, right? Whether it’s in a battle with vampires in Underworld, Benicio del Toro’s The Wolfman, Russel Tovey’s “George” on Being Human (the BBC version), or Seth Green’s “Oz” on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, we’ve had a few recent entries since Lon Chaney Jr.’s take on the story in The Wolf Man back in 1941. Howling at the moon has never looked so good.

And D&D brought all sorts of other fun shape-changers to my attention as a kid. Were-creatures gained all sorts of friends such as werebears, wereboars, and wererats. Whether you use lycanthropy as a disease or a racial type, you have plenty of options.

So perhaps it’s time to introduce some wild things into your campaign and let the full moon bring out the beasts!

3. Symbology

Depending on how you look at the moon, you can gain some interesting ideas from how we use it today and how the moon appears in myths from around the world. Usually the symbology has some practical application to the original cultures of the myths and stories.

For example, the Algonquin tribes of North America named the full moon differently throughout the year. The “Worm Moon” in March signified the beginning of spring when earthworms would appear and birds could find them more easily. The “Hunter’s Moon” in October offered light for hunting so the tribes could put away food for the coming winter. Other examples can be found here at Windows To The Universe.

Joseph Campbell talks about the moon and sun in a different manner. The way the moon’s phases work with the shadow of the earth make it seem as though it slowly is eaten away, disappears, and is reborn in a regular cycle. The sun on the other hand is a constant, so if it’s ever eclipsed it’s panic time, but also represents the constancy of consciousness. Or the impression that the sun is trying to dry out or kill the world. There’s a great portion of an interview with Joseph Campbell on YouTube here that talks about this very topic.

Or you could use the simple approach of the moon passing through it’s various phases as a show of strength. A whole or “full” moon represents some forces at their zenith while a new or “dark” moon represents those forces at their weakest. So various cultures or myths or even magical abilities could be dependent on the cycles of particular moons or suns. I could imagine a multi-lunar system as being quite an interesting force to reckon with as far as moons and magic might go.

Credit: ESO/L. Calçada

4: Cosmology

I saved cosmology for last because it to me brings in the world building or setting aspects for the fantasy genre. Though we scientifically know now that there is no life on our one moon, there was a lot of debate about what was “up there” for a long time. Some even believed there were beings living on the moon.

If you look at the John Carter of Mars stories, there’s the idea of portals or technology that allows one to transport from Mars to Earth and back again. Perhaps something similar could exist between moons and planets to allow magical transport between them. Instead of a group of Drow inhabiting the Underdark, perhaps they instead live on the dark side of the moon and stage raids on the worlds for various supplies, slaves, and sacrifices.

The idea of moons corresponding to different planes of existence or dimensions is another aspect to explore. Even if the correlation is merely philosophical in nature, I could see various moons corresponding to different elemental planes of fire, earth, water, and air for example, depending on how the solar system was arranged.

Entire plots could come into play if gods or other powerful beings began adding or removing moons from the sky. How would a religion take the loss of a moon? Or explain the sudden intrusion of a new one? What sorts of cataclysmic events would arise from having additional bodies in orbit? Would the tides become worse as the push and pull of gravity changed stresses on oceans or even internal pressures?

Brian “Fitz” Fitzpatrick is a Software Engineer who manages (or is that mangles) Game Knight Reviews and tinkers with writing game materials via his Moebius Adventures imprint. When he’s not writing about gaming, he’s actually gaming or at least thinking about gaming in some capacity. During the non-writing, non-gaming time he’s likely trying to keep up with his wife and two daughters or wrangling code for a living!

photo by meckimac from commons.wikimedia.org

As GMs and players we have an odd obsession with time. When it comes to combat, we track it down to rounds of a few seconds, making sure we know who acts when to keep order at the table. We track it as our characters cross expanses of wilderness, caves, or dungeons to gauge when random encounters may occur, when magical effects expire, and when daylight appears or disappears…

But time for world designers is a different beast. Was an area always forest? At what point did the seas form or boil away? How long did a particular type of creature or organization rule unopposed over the landscape?

When this type of question appears, I try to look at time from a different perspective.

If it’s a question involving individuals or small groups of people (families, organizations, and so on), it happens on a much smaller scale. Months, years, decades, or centuries usually. These events occur in the span of mortal lifetimes.

If it’s a question involving civilization, I look at things in terms of decades, centuries, or millennia. This is more of a generational time frame, where organizations can pass knowledge and prejudices over a longer span of time. I also keep in mind the effects of the “telephone game.” Time, like space or any other context, can change how a message is interpreted down the line.

If it’s a question involving nature, I use the same scale but expand it to multiple millennia or even millions or billions of years. Look at how the jungles of many parts of the world have hidden the ruins of fallen civilizations effectively for hundreds or thousands of years. Or how rising waters have swallowed entire portions of continents. The landscape of the dinosaurs was far different than what we see today.

If it’s a question involving geology, it gets expanded to the wide end of the time spectrum as well unless the world is technologically adept at terraforming. Tectonic plates can shift. Mountains rise. Land falls into the sea. Rivers carve canyons. Glaciers advance and recede creating valleys.

As GMs we are in a great position to use time as another tool in the box. Do we want a culture to be in decline after ruling the world for thousands of years? Figure out where they were at the height of their empire and then determine how that has been whittled away year by year, decade by decade, century by century.

Or imagine a world in the throes of great geologic change where land bridges form and dissolve, allowing civilizations and animal populations a way to shift and become isolated over time, changing from what they were in the beginning.

Brian “Fitz” Fitzpatrick is a Software Engineer who manages (or is that mangles) Game Knight Reviews and tinkers with writing game materials via his Moebius Adventures imprint. When he’s not writing about gaming, he’s actually gaming or at least thinking about gaming in some capacity. During the non-writing, non-gaming time he’s likely trying to keep up with his wife and two daughters or wrangling code for a living!

Character histories seem to be one of those things that players seem to love or hate. But they help put our characters into a bit of context in the world they live in.

Our characters live in terms we can all identify with… They are born, live a while, then die. In between, they live in terms of all those delineations we’ve come to accept – from seconds to days, months to years, decades and even centuries. Not many of us may live to the century mark in the real world, but our family memories can stretch far beyond a single life into the lives of whole generations. So why don’t we use the generational view to help define our characters a bit better?

When we construct character histories, we often ask things like:

• How old are they?
• Do they have any siblings?
• Are their parents still alive? Grandparents?
• What do they know?
• Who do they know? Friends or enemies?
• What do they do?

But sometimes it can be fun to ask some questions on a more macro level:

• How far back can you trace their family tree?
• Who were the heroes and villains in their family history?
• What major historical events did their family participate in?
• Where did their family start?
• Is the family known for anything in particular?
• Is the family name recognized beyond the confines of their particular neighborhood, town, city, nation, etc?

Obviously when we delve deeper like this we need our GMs to buy into the process, but basically we’re seeking ways to clarify how the character fits into the greater scheme of things. And asking questions about one family can raise points about other families that they may have crossed paths with along the way. Are there any family rivalries? Feuds? Rifts? It can become a much larger thing than one single character.

Yes, I understand that every bit of information you come up with for your characters can potentially become a hook for your GM to tug on mercilessly during a campaign, but isn’t that the goal? Each hook means that the character is that much more an actual part of the world they inhabit. It becomes that much easier to find ways to motivate your character and the characters around them to do heroic (or dastardly) things if you can put events into a perspective that they understand.

Plus, this broadens the conversation that you can have with your GM or DM to learn more about the history of the world and how your character is woven into it. That way even if your character should die in the telling of a particular story, perhaps they become part of the larger narrative even in death that you, the GM, or other players could then build upon.

Obviously this is just one avenue to explore when building a character. What other avenues have you explored as players or GMs to help the world seem more alive to PCs and NPCs?

Brian “Fitz” Fitzpatrick is a Software Engineer who manages (or is that mangles) Game Knight Reviews and tinkers with writing game materials via his Moebius Adventures imprint. When he’s not writing about gaming, he’s actually gaming or at least thinking about gaming in some capacity. During the non-writing, non-gaming time he’s likely trying to keep up with his wife and two daughters or wrangling code for a living!

photo by justin1569 at en.wikipedia

My home state of Colorado is currently on fire, which has me thinking about using natural disasters in campaigns. (Yes, I’m struck by the irony that my house is 6 miles away from the site of the Black Forest fire and I’m sitting here pondering how to use that in a game…) Though I’ve played through at least one module (Second Darkness from Paizo) that involved a tsunami of some variety and read a Kaidan adventure that involved a blizzard (Frozen Wind from Rite Publishing), I’ve not really seen many adventures that use them. Wonder why?

Natural disasters offer some interesting hooks GMs and designers could leverage in a variety of ways. They might encounter people fleeing the site of a crisis. Perhaps there are first responders (knights, clergy, mages, etc) charging to face the crisis head on. It might be as simple as a royal decree declaring some area off limits due to a crisis.

And though these may be created by Mother Nature herself, nothing says they couldn’t be created by some deity or wizard or elemental force blowing off steam. The God of the Sea might have been offended by a king and choose to wipe away some city or town along the coast out of spite. Or two wizards may battle it out and destroy the environment in an area to the point where tragic drought drives people from their homes in droves. Maybe a rift between the planes allowed a chaotic elemental force into the world and it’s on a rampage…

The possibilities are truly endless. And as we see in our own world, disasters seem to occur regularly on scales both big and small.

Natural disasters might include things like tsunamis, hurricanes, water spouts, or floods; blizzards or hard freezes; volcanic eruptions, lightning-sparked fires and droughts; thunder storms or tornadoes. And if that’s not enough, you can also add at least two of the classic biblical plagues – disease or pestilence – to the mix. Plus, there are always the man-made variety of disasters such as genocide, slash and burn, arson, war, mass poisoning, acts of terrorism, and so on…

Here are ten different ways you can think about working a disaster into your game. The party…:

1. …passes a group of people on the road fleeing the site of a recent disaster.
2. …overhears some people talking about a recent disaster in a crowd or tavern.
3. …is passed on the road by a small group of heroes heading to the site of a recent disaster to help.
4. …hears a town crier announcing that the area of a recent disaster is now off limits by royal decree.
5. …notices a sudden evacuation of wildlife escaping a local disaster.
6. …comes across the site of destruction from a recent (or ancient) disaster.
7. …feels the impact of a nearby disaster while traveling (local tremors, strong winds, torrential rain, etc.).
8. …runs into a staging area where people have gathered to treat the wounded after a local disaster.
9. …can see the effects of a nearby disaster at a distance (smoke, volcanic eruption, storm clouds, etc.).
10. …is stopped on the road by local authorities preventing them from entering an area affected by disaster.

For some reading on ancient disasters, here are a few articles:

• 8 Natural Disasters of Ancient Times at Listverse by Shelly Barclay
• Wikipedia has several articles on Ancient Health Disasters and Ancient Natural Disasters
• About.com has a collection of articles on Ancient Natural Disasters
• Erik Sass @ Mental Floss has a list of 11 Natural Disasters that Led to Wars
• Ben Conoley @ ModernMan.com has a list of Ancient Cities Wiped Out By Disasters

We don’t lack for disasters to use in our campaigns, only the reasons and will to use them!

(Please keep a good thought for the people affected by the fires in Colorado and disasters elsewhere this summer. It’s going to be another rough season I’m afraid.)

Brian “Fitz” Fitzpatrick is a Software Engineer who manages (or is that mangles) Game Knight Reviews and tinkers with writing game materials via his Moebius Adventures imprint. When he’s not writing about gaming, he’s actually gaming or at least thinking about gaming in some capacity. During the non-writing, non-gaming time he’s likely trying to keep up with his wife and two daughters or wrangling code for a living!

When writing text for our games we often have to describe something in great detail. But detail is like the hole Alice falls down to Wonderland… Sometimes it turns into a black hole and we free fall forever. So today I want to focus on a technique for getting more sensory detail into your writing without falling down the rabbit hole

We all know the main senses, right? Visual (sight). Auditory (hearing). Gustatory (taste). Olfactory (smell). And tactile (touch). But we sometimes get so wrapped up in one of them (usually visual or auditory) that we tend to forget the others like we’re wearing blinders. How do we defeat that? With a random table, of course!

Here’s a simple way to offer some description without going overboard: the Sense Table. Get out your trusty d8 any time you want to stretch your skills to describe something and consult this table…

1. Sight
2. Hearing
3. Taste
4. Smell
5. Touch
6. Roll twice (re-roll on 6-8)
7. Roll three times (re-roll on 6-8)
8. Roll again (re-roll on 6-8)

For each sense you roll, come up with some descriptive text using that particular form of perception.

Here are a few examples:

• I’m trying to describe a clue in the dungeon and roll a 1 – sight. “At first glance, the worn statue appears to be the open maw of a dragon…”
• An encounter is coming up and I roll a 4 – smell. “The odor is the first thing that you notice as you enter the alley, with a scent somewhere between a dead fish and a dog fart…”
• Or perhaps the party is tasting the local cuisine for the first time and you roll a 6 (roll twice), followed by a 2 (hearing) and a 5 (touch). “The natives believe that eating the fresh entrails of a dova beast grants the consumer strength and conviction in the coming days. But from the first time you touch the slimy viscera with your naked fingers, bring a piece to your mouth, and hear the juicy squish as you take a bite – you just know it’s not going to stay down…”

The trick of course is to be descriptive without being overly so. You want to provide enough detail to let an image start to form in the mind of your readers or listeners (whether it’s just yourself, another GM, or a group of players) and fill in the rest from their own imaginations. Sometimes it can be fun to go a bit overboard (like my last example above), but usually you want to strike a balance.

How do you do that? A couple of tricks come to mind. One is to write what you think works and put it away for as long as you have time to do so before getting it out again and reading it out loud. You might want to stop at the point where you start to get a picture in your head or when you think you’ve got enough of your point across. Or another simple way is to count the adjectives or descriptive phrases. If you have three or more, whittle it down a little until it feels about right.

It’s a fine line you’ll have to feel out on your own to see what works for you. Be sure to ask for feedback from other writer friends and see what your audience thinks about a particular section if it’s still causing you problems.

Brian “Fitz” Fitzpatrick is a Software Engineer who manages (or is that mangles) Game Knight Reviews and tinkers with writing game materials via his Moebius Adventures imprint. When he’s not writing about gaming, he’s actually gaming or at least thinking about gaming in some capacity. During the non-writing, non-gaming time he’s likely trying to keep up with his wife and two daughters or wrangling code for a living!