Imagining the Far-Future Year of 2025

It’s always an event when the real world catches up to the putative timeframe of a famous science fiction work. If you’re on any form of social media, you have probably seen this in action. Blade Runner, released in 1982, was set in 2019, and when the real 2019 arrived, people had a fun time posting about it. Soylent Green, released in 1973, is presented as taking place in 2022, so in real-life 2022, the Soylent Green posts duly appeared. It’s easy to pick some tentpole speculative fiction, particularly of the dystopian variety, and joke on social media about how the fiction does or does not reflect the real world.

But whatever you thought of the state of society in 2019, it bore only a faint resemblance to the rain-soaked, neon-drenched vision of Blade Runner. And while I saw posts comparing the pandemic-stricken world of 2022 to Soylent Green, I think that’s even more of a stretch. Soylent Green was primarily concerned with overpopulation, a pertinent topic in the 1970s that didn’t figure in real-world 2022’s problems. Different dystopia.

But I want to credit two* works of fiction that correctly predicted some interesting things about our real-life present year of 2025: the 2013 Spike Jonze movie Her, and the 2006 Vernor Vinge** novel Rainbow’s End. I have endeavored to keep this post spoiler-free, but feel free to check out one or both works and come back afterward, if you are conservative on hearing plot details.

Her

Her is the story of a lonely man who falls in love with an artificial intelligence on his computer. It is hardly the first piece of science fiction to explore the idea of a person falling in love with a robot or other artificially created person. But most other works were about robots, and were set further in the distant future. The titular character in Her is decidedly non-physical, and much of the story involves the two main characters navigating what that means for their developing relationship.

Life imitates art, and in real-life 2025, there are now many stories of people interacting with AIs as if they were real people. The movie was so influential on artificial intelligence that OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, tried to get Scarlett Johansson (who portrayed the AI in Her) to lend her voice to their products. After she refused, they went with an allegedly similar voice, which got them into legal trouble.

Her is not a precise picture of 2025. The setting almost feels like a utopia, apart from what seems like a widespread epidemic of loneliness. The technology around AI is decidedly well ahead of our real-world tech. But its vision of how AI would affect relationships, and how people would try to find genuine connections with AIs – is seriously prescient.

Rainbows End 

Rainbows End, like Her, is set in the California of 2025. The primary point-of-view character is an elderly man who has been cured of dementia and had his health so thoroughly restored that he looks like a 20-something. But he doesn’t fit in at all in this new world, and his struggles to grapple with change inadvertently embroil him and his family in a conspiracy that threatens world stability.

Rainbows End heavily emphasizes augmented reality, where virtual worlds and interfaces overlay the real one. This technology does exist in real-world 2025, and is getting more widespread by the day, but it is not integral to the fabric of everyday life as it is in Rainbows End, where many people have multiple overlays of projected reality on top of the “real” world. The real world may look a lot more like Rainbows End by the 2040s or 2050s, but it isn’t there yet in 2025.

That said, the Rainbows End is prescient on several other topics. A big chunk of the story hinges on a battle around a university library and the digitization (and subsequent destruction) of its book collection. It also thinks deeply about how education and careers would change in a world so completely saturated with data. The book understands how children become intuitively fluent in new technologies, often in ways that they can’t even explain, and how quickly they lose their connection to cultural experiences that aren’t represented in the virtual worlds and communities they inhabit. Finally, it groks how online fandoms become powerful forces on their own. The height of the Pokemon Go craze, with fandom filtered through augmented reality, would have fit neatly in the world of Rainbows End. 

If the worst thing you can say about a work of speculative fiction is that it predicted changes accurately, but a bit more quickly than they actually happened, that’s a good sign that the work did its job.

Sir, This is a Wendy’s

So what’s the relevance to roleplaying games?

You can create verisimilitude in a game world by thinking deeply about how ordinary people use technology (or magic, or whatever is the "disruptive tech" of your fictional setting). It’s easy to think about high tech or high magic in the ways our PCs will interact with it, especially in a heroic fantasy game or a cyberpunk thriller. But we should also think about how ordinary people use it, and how that would show up in the quotidian fabric of the world.

What is world-changing one day is completely ordinary the next. And the time it takes an idea to go from world-changing to taken for granted is surprisingly short. There’s no shortage of examples in real-world 2025; technology that would baffle the previous generation is completely natural to modern-day young people.

And it is better to take some big swings and big misses than to conservatively aim for what seems most plausible. The example of a conservative approach that always comes to mind for me is the driverless car aesthetic you see in a lot of TV sci-fi, like the third season of Westworld or the futuristic parts of Netflix’s Bodies. The car design there is very believable… a little too believable. I don’t see a vision, a speculative gamble that really makes me curious about this future. Don't play it to safe with speculative fiction; better to be interesting and wrong than boring and right.

*Honorable mention to Futuresport, the 1998 made-for-TV movie starring Dean Cain, Vanessa Williams, and Wesley Snipes. It isn't saying anything that Rollerball or the Running Man or other movies hadn't already said better. But to its credit, Dean Cain’s voice-activated smart home is pretty close to what an Alexa-plus-AI home would provide to a real rich person in 2025.

**Another of Vinge’s novels has one of my favorite examples of a science fiction author predicting the future and getting it almost (but not quite) right. Vinge's novel Marooned in Realtime was published in 1986. The story makes passing reference to a big-budget film adaptation of the Lord of the Rings, released around the turn of the century. Fellowship of the Ring was released in 2001, so Vinge nailed this prediction. 

But Vinge, presumably working on the novel in the early 1980s, guessed that it would be none other than George Lucas helming that LOTR adaptation. In real-life 2001, Lucas was of course doing his own big-budget trilogy; but he was halfway between Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, not working on LOTR.  

It is hard to fault Vinge for this guess, as he was writing when Lucas was at the height of his creative powers, fresh off Star Wars and his Indiana Jones script. And obviously Vinge couldn't predict the strange career path of actual LOTR director Peter Jackson, whose first feature film hadn't even come out yet when Marooned in Realtime was published. But I love these little moments in speculative genre fiction, and the subtle details that separate what is shockingly correct from what is so far off the mark.

The World's Largest Rewrite: Grey Horse, Devil Swine, and Normal Humans

Last time: The World's Largest Rewrite: Floating Heads, Mother Fungus, Cellipedes

#60: Horse. OK, yes, I jumped into this exercise without really thinking about how to handle the various mundane “monsters” in the OSE bestiary. I don’t want to overlap with mules and camels, so I’m going to dive deeper into the Monster Overhaul, my manual of choice, to populate this one.

The book includes an entry for a “grey horse,” a strange constructed thing in the shape of a horse that challenges travelers to make clever rhymes, eating their rations as punishment if they fail. The grey horse seems too benign to be a prisoner, and too capricious to be one of the jailers. I’ll treat it as an invasive species, but without explaining how it got here (the grey horse just shows up in places where it is not wanted).

#84: Normal Human. Ah yes, the most dangerous monster of all; the Normal Human. OSE defines them as “Non-adventuring humans without a character class. Artists, beggars, children, craftspeople, farmers, fishermen, housewives, scholars, slaves.” But they are also implicitly not bandits, or pirates, or nobles, or any of the other “monster” types in the OSE bestiary that are obviously humans, but have their own entry. Essentially this is what the modern game would call a commoner.

I think we have some Normal Humans here who are guilty of Abnormal Crimes. They’re probably not individually dangerous to adventurers; even the typical serial killer is more of an opportunistic-but-ordinary person, rather than someone with high levels as an assassin or something. These Normal Humans are like the prisoners in Con Air or the mooks in the Batman Arkham games. They are weak, but numerous. And they likely have some powerful leaders among them as prison bosses; maybe NPCs with classes, maybe actual monsters.

#106: Shark. Shark!! The shark brings us back to the submerged section of our dungeon. We want to distinguish a bit from the other monsters that have flooded (literally and figuratively) into the prison. Picking randomly among OSE’s three sharks, we get the bull shark, which can ram and stun prey for three rounds. This is a nice twist that you don’t really see from beasts in modern D&D. I like the idea of the bull sharks ramming prey as they pass through a transitory space like a submerged hallway. The hallways are navigable for the sharks but too narrow for the sea serpent, who is the alpha predator in the seawater sector. Stunned swimmers sink deeper into the depths, so attempting to rescue them presents further risk for their allies. The crabs clean up what the bull sharks don't eat, at the bottom of the halls, amongst the bones of failed prison escapees.

#70: Lycanthrope. I usually choose a subtype randomly, but in this case I am going to simply pick the devil swine, because (a. they’re much more evocative than the other, more standard lycanthropes, and (b. they’re evil, so they’re the easiest to explain as prisoners of celestials. OSE describes them as follows: “Corpulent humans who can change into huge swine. Love to eat human flesh. Lurk in isolated human settlements close to forests or marshes.”

A devil swine has 9 HD (!) and a charm ability. So these guys are not minor brutes, but instead dangerous bosses, and with their charm ability, probably a powerful faction in their own right. I imagine they’ve been strategically charming other prisoners to take over the prison and eventually try to escape. Relative to some of the other very archetypal monsters we have featured so far, “shapeshifting mind-control pigs” could really surprise players.

Another nice detail on lycanthropes is as follows: “Horses and some other animals can smell lycanthropes and will become afraid.” The grey horse and the mules are both aware of the devil swine and could help the players avoid them, or at least anticipate their presence.

#22: Chimera. Another folklore classic. OSE doesn’t provide any suggestions beyond a visual description. The Overhaul gives us more to work with, including a roll table that produces a chimera with a goat for the left head and hindquarters, a leopard for the center head and forequarters, and a newt for the right head and tail. It breathes poison gas and has no wings. Created by a wizard who is also probably interred here.

#26: Cyclops. It’s interesting to compare the OSE cyclops to one from a more modern-style monster manual. The OSE version hews close to the Odyssey; it raises sheep, is slow-witted, and possesses the ability to curse people. All straight out of the Greek lore.

The 2014 5E monster manual, by comparison, shunts this information into the flavor text, abstracting it away from the source myths. Consequently, aside from its poor depth perception, the 5E cyclops has almost nothing to distinguish it from the statistically similar hill giant, which is a shame, particularly because 5E has an abundance of interchangeable brutes like this taking up space in the book.

The Overhaul parsimoniously groups the cyclops with the giants, so we’ll roll there to get some more of an idea of what to do with this dude. The “Why fight these giants?” table produces “They keep growing larger. Soon it won’t be possible to harm them.” So this cyclops was getting bigger and bigger with no end in sight, and the magic of the prison keeps that magical growth in check. The cyclops may even be a willing prisoner here, worried that the prison’s weakening structural integrity will reboot their uncontrollable embiggening.

#7: Beetle, Giant. The fire beetle (a fantasy firefly) and the oil beetle (a fantasy bombardier beetle) are the famous ones here, but rolling randomly tilts me toward the Tiger Beetle (a fantasy… uh, tiger beetle). OSE tiger beetles “hunt robber flies, but sometimes eat humans.” The bit about robber flies is useful, as we haven’t placed those guys yet.

The real-life tiger beetle has a number of gameable features we can steal, including antlion-like larvae that burrow into the sand to trap prey; an ability to charge very quickly toward prey, but with the need to stop and visually reorient; and the ability to mimic the sounds of toxic moths so that bats won’t eat them. We can tie these guys to both the robber flies and the bats when we get those results. 

#100: Rock Baboon. Once again I’m charmed by old-school D&D’s “animal, but slightly weird” approach, contra modern D&D’s harder division between mundane animals (lumped together in the back of the manual) and fantastic monsters. The rock baboon is a pretty straightforward monster per the OSE entry, but I do enjoy that they “communicate with screams.” Same, rock baboon, same. How far can we take that? 

Perhaps relative to other creatures in the dungeon, the rock baboons are particularly good at communicating important information over relatively far distances. The primary danger when encountering a single baboon or a small group is that they will alert the rest of their troop, even if they are far away. The baboons could even be useful allies if befriended, facilitating long-distance communication (filtered through baboon-speak, of course).

#134: Wolf. The most interesting bit about wolves in the OSE entry is that they can be trained, and that goblins ride dire wolves. So we have two possible routes here; wolves trained by the wardens to police the prison, and wolves ridden by the goblins we haven’t seen yet. The next entry better serves the prior option, so I’m going to go with the latter and assume these are goblin-affiliated wolves. We’ll put the wolves near the hobgoblins and leave the door open for a greater goblin zone in the prison.

#10: Blink Dog. Apparently we’re in the dog block. In addition to their signature teleport ability, blink dogs are lawful and hate warp beasts. I think it makes sense to consider them servants of the jailers. Their blink ability would make them well-suited to capture, corral, or pursue prisoners without the prison’s physical barriers limiting their movement. Perhaps they’ve been left to their own devices since the prison has gone to rot. A first encounter with the blink dogs will probably involve them shadowing PCs or observing them from afar to take their measure. They could be powerful allies for PCs who earn their trust by containing monsters or stopping escapes.

The Tombs of Atuan and What Belief Means for Clerics

“There are riches there; Thar tells me about them sometimes. Enough to fill the Godking’s temple ten times over. Gold and trophies given ages ago, a hundred generations, who knows how long. They’re all locked away in the pits and vaults, underground. They won’t take me there yet, they keep me waiting and waiting. But I know what it’s like. There are rooms underneath the Hall, underneath the whole Place, under where we stand now. There’s a great maze of tunnels, a Labyrinth. It’s like a great dark city, under the hill. Full of gold, and the swords of old heroes, and old crowns, and bones, and years, and silence.”

-The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula Le Guin

I had read Ursula Le Guin before (The Left Hand of Darkness and Lathe of Heaven), but not the Earthsea books. I recently began to rectify that, and some elements of A Wizard of Earthsea, the first book in the series, made it in to several blog posts. Tombs of Atuan is the second book in the series.

Belief Is Not Either/Or 

In the background of the first third or so of Tombs of Atuan is a society where a (relatively) young theocracy built around a putative godking is co-opting and gradually replacing the old religion. But this is all understood and filtered through the perspective of a child who has basically never left the ritual shrine. The story does an excellent job of establishing this information organically; there are no lore dumps. Tenar, the protagonist, is instructed in part by servants of the godking who have their own motives. The godking doesn’t take an active role in the plot and isn’t an antagonist per se, but the worldbuilding really makes Tenar’s precarious position much more compelling. 

RPG settings sometimes explore this space, but usually with a more direct, head-on confrontation, like organized Christianity-style religion versus folkloric paganism. Or a pantheon of clear and unambiguous domains, where the life god is opposed to the death god, and it has always been thus. Tombs of Atuan is a reminder that it can be useful to focus more on the role of religion in people’s lives, how they navigate change, and what rituals are important to them.

Belief Is Ritual 

The wizard Ged, the protagonist of the first Earthsea book, appears in Tombs of Atuan as well. Ged’s magic (producing light, changing form, altering the weather) is recognizable as D&D magic, but Tenar doesn’t cast any spells. Her entire power is the ability to enact rituals, to interpret the will of suprahuman entities, to be protected from them, and to petition them. 

This makes them "feel" a lot different than wizards and clerics in modern-style RPGs, who have different spell lists but otherwise "work" largely the same. Whereas Ged's magic is proactive and transformative, Tenar's magic is reactive and divinatory. 

Belief Is the Attention of Ancient Things

For good or for ill, Tenar has the ear of… something that lives in the titular tombs. Whether these are gods or ghosts or genius loci or something else is not conclusively stated, and doesn’t need to be. Modern D&D draws a hard line between clerics and warlocks, but its easy to imagine that as a matter of public image. Ultimately, everyone who entreats the aid of the supernatural and the supernormal is taking chances with beings who are not and cannot be understood, and that should suggest a gravity and seriousness to the relationship that RPGs don't always deliver on. Belief is less about faith versus atheism, as in the modern world. Belief is more a matter of being willing to expose oneself to the dangerous and largely unknowable attentions of entities beyond mortal ken.

The RPG Revelation: GM as Interpreter and Medium

I can’t turn off my GM brain when listening to an actual play podcast. As entertaining as the content may be, and as much as I can appreciate different styles of GMing, it is hard for me not to listen to an RPG session unfolding and say “I would handle that situation so differently.”

With that in mind, listening to 3d6 DtL’s recently concluded Arden Vul campaign has been an interesting experience. About 90% of the time, I'm on the same page as Jon, the podcast's GM. He prioritizes player choice, adjudicates fairly, and isn’t afraid to present consequences when the PCs get in over their head. 

But the 10% where we do things differently is the interesting part. One example is that Jon is quite transparent when the text of the Arden Vul campaign doesn’t provide the answer to a question the players have proposed. At times he even says something like “Richard doesn’t say,” referring to Richard Barton, the module’s writer.

Early in listening to the show, this made me wince. While I try not to be too precious with verisimilitude, I do make an effort to preserve it. Why remind the players of the layers of artifice at work between the creation of the game and their experience with it? Not just that they are playing a game, but that the game is being mediated from the author through the GM, and that there is no easy, in-session way for the latter to seek clarity from the former.

But the more I heard of this approach, the more I warmed up to it. Because it is entirely viable to cast the GM less as the storyteller and master of all knowledge, and more as an interpreter and medium of exogenous content. 

The GM is an interpreter in that they are taking an inherently incomplete text and attempting to translate it for the benefit of the players. Except perhaps for read-aloud text, everything in a published RPG product needs to be translated. Descriptive notes need to be translated into what the players can perceive. Tables need to be translated into actual events. A monster stat block must be translated into an in-fiction diegetic entity. And the text is partial, inevitably missing information that will come up in the game. The GM must emendate the text for the players, making reasonable decisions to fill in the blanks that the players will inevitably find. 

The GM is also a medium, in that they must intuit the will of the creator, going beyond what is on the page. Even a writer creating the most painstakingly thorough RPG product in the world is only going to anticipate a tiny fraction of the things PCs will do with that product. This is a feature, not a bug. The magic of roleplaying is that no matter how many times a new group runs Lost Mines of Phandelver or Keep on the Borderlands or any of the other most popular modules in the history of RPGs, the output is going to be different. The GM can act as medium, and allow the spirit of the creator to act through them. In a good RPG session, the writer is like a ghost that is dimly perceived, as the GM intuits their will beyond what was explicitly written on the page.

We can and should have strong opinions about the role of the GM. But we should also keep an open mind when observing how others run games. You never know what strange truths they may reveal. 

Frieren and What It Means to Play a Truly Ancient PC

Frieren, the manga and anime about the titular elf, is in many ways classic fantasy, using a lot of common fantasy vernacular to tell its story. A dragon is a dragon, a wizard is a wizard, and even a mimic can be used as a sight gag without explaining what a mimic is, and why it resembles a treasure chest. 

But Frieren also does several things that most classic fantasy does not, including taking seriously the idea that elves with extremely long lifespans would live fundamentally different lives than humans.

Of course, the concept of elves as long-lived beings is itself part of that common fantasy vernacular, and is drawn from Tolkien, who originated the idea of an "elf" as something distinct from the way the term was used in fairy tales, interchangeably with “gnome” or "fairy" and other depictions of magical fey folk. 

In The Fellowship of the Ring, when the members of the fellowship are talking about what is (to them) ancient history, Elrond can weigh in and say he was actually there. He witnessed those events firsthand.  This is a powerful way of illustrating the difference in how these people live. Frieren does the same thing, to great effect. 

But a lot of other fantasy derived from Tolkien tends to copy the aesthetics without incorporating the underlying worldbuilding. D&D rarely presents its elves as truly long-lived creatures, because elves are first and foremost PCs, and it is difficult to embed a PC in ancient lore, or think about what they might have been doing 300 years prior to the game's start.

But is there a way we could we create a more Tolkien/Frieren treatment for elvish PCs? I do not mean the “penalty to strength, bonus to charisma" kind of mechanics that D&D has sometimes applied to its ancestries. Instead, a simple layer of situational advantages and disadvantages could provide characters with hooks for understanding how their character’s age affects their place in the story. These could be literal advantages and disadvantages (applied to d20 rolls) or more abstracted tools for resolving situations.

Normal Lifespan

These creatures rarely live far beyond 100 years. The category includes humans, halflings, dragonborn, tieflings, and many other sapient creatures not otherwise known for long lifespans.

Disadvantage: Ignorant of history. You aren’t familiar with much of the world beyond your own experience. Unless you are a scholar or other specialist who has had a specific reason to learn something about the history of a person, place, or thing, you just don’t know it. You may know the history of your family over the past several generations, or the last century or so of events in the community where you grew up, but that’s about it.

Advantage: Unencumbered by the past. Longer-lived creatures do not expect you to know or adhere to customs, traditions, or obligations not expressly presented to you in any kind of formal social situation. A human among dwarves or elves can get away with a lot of behavior that those peoples would consider rude or even offensive in a venerable peer who should “know better.” A human or other normal-lifespan person can always throw off the obligations of country and clan if they choose to do so, and longer-lived peoples will simply view that as being the natural way of such short-lived people.

Extended Lifespan

These creatures can live to be several hundred years old. Dwarves and gnomes are the most well-known members of this category. Creatures of the land, of rock and stone, often belong to this category.

Disadvantage: Unforgotten Feuds. These people have long memories. Their lives are too long to allow for the quick passage of time from generation to generation to wash away disputes; but they are not so long-lived that such disputes will ever seem inherently trivial. A creature with an extended lifespan likely has at least one unsettled feud with a member of any large community they visit.

Advantage: Appeal to the Old Ways. In their dealings with other creatures as old or older than them, people with extended lifespans can always appeal to an alternate system of resolution to resolve a problem. Depending on the culture or polity where the dispute takes place, it could be trial by combat, an appeal to the gods, or something more esoteric. The important thing is that the alternative definitively predates whatever the normal, contemporary resolution would be to a dispute. 

Long Lifespan

These creatures can live hundreds of years, approaching 1000. Elves, of course, fit into this category. Other people who are not immortal, but whose infusion of magic lends them to greatly expanded lifespans, can fit in this category (for example, the druid’s high-level Timeless Body ability in D&D 5E fits this fiction well). 

Disadvantage: People are like leaves in the wind. Like Frieren herself, people with long lifespans struggle to form lasting relationships with others. When they travel to a place they haven’t been recently, at least one person, organization, or institution has changed since they were last here. Someone has died. The government has changed. The customs and culture are radically different. This will always take the long-lived person by surprise, no matter how many times it happens. 

Advantage: I was there. There is always a chance that something that seems ancient, secret, and powerful to the younger peoples is recent, obvious, and mundane to a long-lived person. Even if they didn’t personally witness an event or know a historical figure, they always have a chance of knowing things that no one else remembers.  

The RPG Prestige: GM as Stage Magician

Is the GM a referee? Or are they a performer? Are they adjudicating a game? Or curating an experience?

I strongly dislike the RPG habit of fudging. A GM fudges when they alter die rolls or other randomized elements of the game to steer a session toward a favored outcome. I have previously written about my issues with it. But I also believe it is worth seriously thinking about why fudging is so compelling for many GMs out there.

And one possible reason is that some GMs think of themselves less like impartial adjudicators and more like stage magicians. The verisimilitude is not some external thing that all the people at the table can independently verify, but rather an illusion or trick that the GM is performing for the players. 

And the players, like an audience at a stage magic show, have agreed to be deceived. Most people in audience at a magic show are not there to "see through" or "figure out" the trick. They are there to suspend their disbelief and enjoy the performance. A GM who is working with a stage magician mindset will be much more likely to fudge than a GM who is thinking like a referee.

Magician gif by Jude Coram

Lie to Me 

There isn’t a hard line between these styles. Most DMs are concealing at least some part of their process from the players. Sometimes when a particularly exciting and strange thing happens in a session, a player will ask me, “did you plan that!?” I’m reluctant to explain specifically which aspects of a session's events were firmly rooted in prep contingencies, and which emerged almost completely from the session itself. 

That said, I’m generally not a fan of the stage magic approach to GMing, for several reasons.

The exclusive society. GMing with this idea of "the prestige" in mind reinforces the idea that running games is an exclusive skill available only to the select few who, like magicians, have been inducted into the society of GMs. There is a bright line between the magician and the audience at a magic show. Applying the same idea to GMing discourages players from running their own games.

No room for error. When the illusion of stage magic fails, there’s no easy way to get it back. If a magician blows a trick, the audience is not going to believe anything that follows in the performance. The spell has been broken. Likewise, once a player realizes that the verisimilitude of the game is an illusion maintained by the GM's fudge, they're never going to buy into the magic spell again.

At least, that's my own experience as a player. Once I’m aware of how and why the GM is fudging, the nearly limitless scope of potential that makes RPGs shine shrinks down. The game goes from limitless possibilities to only those possibilities that fit with what the GM has predetermined as acceptable outcomes. 

In contrast, GMing primarily as a referee or adjudicator gives the GM much more flexibility. They are conversing and negotiating with the players, not performing for them.

Buy-in is difficult. Getting players to consent to this deception without conceding it completely is difficult. For stage magic, it is baked into the very experience that the audience is signing up to be fooled. But the same is not true of RPGs, because of course many games do not feature the prestige at all. Some players may want to be fooled, while others (like me) view it as a dealbreaker. 

For My Next Trick

As strongly as I feel about this, I am not a one-true-way GM. As I discussed in the steelmanning post linked above, I can see various reasons why a GM might still choose to fudge.

Ultimately, if the players keep coming back to the stage magician GM’s game, and keep saying they’re having a great time… it is pretty hard for me to argue that the GM is doing something “wrong.” My one request for stage magician GMs is that they ask players to buy in to this arrangement at session zero. Simply advertising the GM's style at the outset solves many of the problems of unaligned expectations.

In Defense of Rats in the Basement

In parallel with my Strangers on a Train game, I’ve also been running Nightmare Over Ragged Hollow by Joseph R. Lewis. It has been refreshing to run Nightmare, as a change of pace from the relatively high-concept Strangers premise, because the idea is straightforward: The local temple is mysteriously surrounded by a golden dome, trapping people inside. The PCs are locals who need to figure the problem out. A small adventuring region around the town provides different opportunities to tackle the problem. Classic fantasy adventure stuff.

In the first session of the game, the PCs decided to make some money by clearing vermin out of the local tailor’s basement. If you’re already groaning, you’re familiar with the rats-in-the-basement cliche; an RPG trope in which novice PCs are given a trivial, one-dimensional fight against low-HD monsters to kick off the game.

Tropes have their place, though. “You meet in a tavern” is another cliche, but it is a cliche because it gets the PCs together and into the action quickly. “Rats in the basement” provides an immediate problem with a straightforward solution that PCs can solve quickly without taking up much session time.

But there are both good and bad ways to run a rats-in-the-basement scenario. A few details can make all the difference. Here’s how I ran this scenario.

There’s a reason for the reward. One of the players quite reasonably asked why a tailor was willing to pay 100 GP for someone to clear vermin out of his basement. I decided that he had an order from the nearby kingdom for some elaborate finery (something like the “London Season” in England in the 19th century, which fueled much of the textile industry at that time). He needed to retrieve the raw materials from his basement in time to complete the work. That was reason enough to justify the reward, and also did a bit of background worldbuilding.

The situation is at least somewhat unknown. The vermin in the basement are not ordinary rats, but spider-rats, and they have some great art (below, by artist Li-An). Always show the players the art! Mechanically, the spider-rats are not too different from mundane rats. But they feel different. Just like the rattagator and the doom cow, the spider-rodents are mechanically ordinary, but the players don't know that, and they are flavorfully evocative enemies. 

Something is at stake beyond HP. After the lead PC failed a roll to start the encounter, I ruled that a spider-rat would drop from the ceiling and crawl into his clothes. So when the resulting fight broke out, there was also a non-combat situation (spider-rat in clothes) with a non-combat goal (eating the PC’s rations). This was simple and low-stakes, but it made the situation feel three-dimensional instead of two-dimensional.

There is an x-factor. The encounter describes the webbed nest of the spider-rats, which serves as a visual reminder that these aren’t ordinary rats (even if they are ordinary rats in terms of mechanics). The web is ultimately harmless, but the PCs don’t know that, and not knowing makes the fight more interesting.

Tactics are weighed against risks. The PCs decided that igniting the nest would be the fastest way to deal with the spider-rats… which might be true… but it would also be the fastest way to destroy the fabrics that were the reason for the job in the first place. A terrible roll nearly lit the tailor’s precious fabrics on fire, and only some quick thinking on the PCs’ part saved them.

There is a choice. The spider-rat that started out in the PCs clothes was the last one left at the end of the fight. The PCs decided to spare it and gave it a nickname. The spared spider-rat goes in the bag of threads, where it can get tangled up with other threads, and potentially reappear later in the game. Players love callbacks like this for multiple reasons, not the least of which is that it shows that choices they made changed the world, are remembered, and come back in unexpected ways.