Themes, Thesauruses, Mysteries, and Megadungeons

Last Week: Premises, Themes, Genre Hacking, and Shower Thoughts

Last week I wrote about turning a premise into tangible themes. This week, let’s get into a crunchy, digestible example.

The premise of our Knave game involves a mystery train that stops at various locations for the players to explore. But neither the premise itself nor the ensuing session zero discussion really defined what kind of locations the PCs would explore. It was an open question. 

So I made a list of words that either came directly out of conversations with the players, or were a step or two removed from those conversations. 

1. Brutalist
2. Cyclopean 
3. Alien
4. Oracular 
5. Innervative
6. Biomechanical
7. Hypnagogic 
8. Demoniacal 
9. Entropic
10. Stellar 
11. Temporal 
12. Apocalyptic
13. Resurrectionist 

I decided to go with all adjectives for a feeling of internal consistency. It’s OK to flex the dictionary and thesaurus a bit here, as long as the words are evocative and interesting.

Because Strangers on a Train is a mystery game, information is revealed gradually. The words at the top of the list are close to the surface, things that might come through within the first few sessions. The second location the PCs visited had very literal brutalist and cyclopean design characteristics.

The terms further down the list may only be perceptible after many sessions. Many megadungeons essentially contain a mystery in the same manner. The first level might be full of sundry bandits and cultists, but the lowest level is the hollow earth / portal to hell / crashed spaceship part of the dungeon, secret from all but the most accomplished adventurers.

Remember that in the last post, we talked about the value of compounded our terms. Words on their own might not get us very far in developing something unusual. They are instead more valuable when we combine them to create something really novel. So oracular-stellar becomes “a structure for studying the stars to predict the future.” Brutalist-hypnogogic becomes “a vast dreaming amphitheater for sleeping explorers.” And so on.

Premises, Themes, Genre Hacking, and Shower Thoughts

“Where do you get your ideas?” It’s a famously cliched question for novelists and other creatives at Q&A sessions. I’m mostly against comparing novelists and other narrative-creators to DMs and game designers, but in this instance there are parallels.

So where do they come from? You can get some ideas from your players, as long as you’re careful to do it in a way that separates the planning DM from the adjudicating DM. But for all but the most purely improvisational games – and the resolutely GM-less ones – the DM needs to generate quite a lot of ideas before the players ever come to the table.

Ideas are everywhere. Other games, other media, news stories, dreams, random combinations of unrelated words. Ideas are easy. Premises are easy. The difficult part is turning those inherently amorphous starting points into actionable tools.

Inspired by a few sources, particularly the spark tables in Electric Bastionland, I’ve settled on a process for turning a premise into actionable themes. I’m thinking primarily about developing a new campaign in a TTRPG, but a lot of the same principles apply more generally to other open-ended, game-adjacent planning and creation efforts. 

That said, I do not advocate this as a one-size-fits-all system. Idea generation and cultivation is highly personal. I expect that if anyone else finds this useful, they will modify it beyond recognition, devising their own tools for developing campaigns, settings, worlds, modules, or entirely new games.

Identify the Major Themes of the Game

This sounds obvious, but many people jump directly from a mere premise to creating content. It’s easy to skip an important intermediary step – unraveling the premise to find the themes that support it. This is much more a matter of deciding what the game is not than deciding what it is.

Science fiction games are a good example; this putative genre includes everything from gritty blue collar space truckers to sword-and-planet romance, and from space opera to physics textbook in action. Throwing a lot of sci-fi at the wall without clear themes will produce an incoherent setting and an indistinct game. It’s absolutely imperative to make choices, to decide what is (and especially what is not) central to the game.

So what are these themes? They’re just universal terms that define the world. At least a dozen words, and ideally closer to 20, like the Bastionland spark table, is good to start. I find half adjectives and half nouns a good mix. For the latter, abstract nouns or gnomic noun categories (“vehicle” rather than “motorcycle”) are best.

A random word generator or AI text generator can be helpful here, but usually only as a starting point or to provide “wrong” answers that can be corrected (because changing a “wrong” answer to a “right” answer is much easier than coming up with a correct answer out of thin air).

Compound the Themes 

The setting comes alive not when a single theme appears on stage, but rather when two themes intertwine, dovetail, or clash violently.

If your list is pretty short, combine each of your words into two-word paired terms, with each pair appearing once. If the list is longer, don’t feel obligated to pair every possible combination; roll dice to pair up words and see where the list takes you. Any time you can introduce a little randomness into the process is beneficial, because it unlocks your oracular subconscious. 

Take some deep breaths in a quiet environment and then go through each combination of words and just think about what images those combinations bring to mind. If you meditate, you can employ that tool here. If you don’t meditate, think of the state your brain is in when you have shower thoughts. Why do shower thoughts arise in the shower? Because for most people, it’s one of the few (waking) periods of the day when the brain is released to wander freely. Embrace that feeling. You want to unscrew the lid on your head halfway, just enough to let some air flow in both directions.

Evaluating the Results

Working through this process will commonly produce two results. The first result is interesting, and the second is really fascinating. The first is a meandering walk toward the expected or genre-vanilla result. Your space opera will include laser swords. Your fantasy world will have elves. Your gritty urban world will have a corrupt underbelly. 

No surprise, right? But it’s still worthwhile to have “gotten there” on your own power. Validating a genre convection proves that you need it and that it deserves to be there. Every idea needs to be checked to confirm you’re not just gliding on assumptions.

The second result, the fascinating one, is when the process spits out something really unexpected. You may feel an immediate instinct to toss out the weird or incongruous result. Don’t do this. Instead, add it to the list and let it hang out. Keep it around for a while. Savor it. Remember, if you’re creating a genre-salient game-thing for players or consumers who are savvy in that genre, the fastest way to lose them is not to create something that doesn’t engage with their expectations of the genre, but rather to create something that relies on those expectations too much. We want – we need – our game to be surprising, even – especially – to people who know the game’s premise well.

If, after some time, you realize that a theme-pair really is too strange or confusing to use as-is, don’t throw it out entirely. Instead, consider the permutations. Is there something synonymous that is worth using? Antonymous? Is the combination’s meaning just obscure? Slang? Jargon? An acronym? Magic words? A brand name?

Remember, the players will probably never actually hear many of these word pairs in a session. These are working in the background. You don’t have to be self-conscious about it or worry about explaining it to someone. This is inside-voice stuff, for your use only. 

Next week: Themes, Thesauruses, Mysteries, and Megadungeons

Beyond the Open Table

Something Judd Karlmann said in a recent episode of the excellent Daydreaming About Dragons podcast caught my attention. It was part of a larger discourse on the challenge of scheduling and running games within the constraints of modern schedules. I quote it as follows, but the relevant bit begins around the 10 minute mark of this episode, for those interested in further context.

“Could we stream a classic Traveller game, where if everybody can’t make it, we just make up new characters in the same world? And we just go and we build something slowly together.”

I started running a West Marches game in 2017 in part to solve attendance issues that had plagued my previous game. Those issues were not the attendance issues of sketchy people failing to commit, but merely the realities of people running businesses, raising families, and otherwise trying to fit a game into the packed schedules of real life.

The game that began in 2017 gradually shed its West Marches origins, but the open table aspect – in which group composition could change session to session based on who could attend – stuck, and it was a big part of the reason that game ran for five years. All of my games are now open table games, and they will be in the future, unless I ever meet a group of players willing to hard-commit to a particular day with a particular frequency.

But Judd’s idea suggests to me an interesting step beyond the open table model I'm already familiar with. It would require the right game and a low-prep or no-prep system. But I can envision a game working like this. 

Every other Thursday night is game night. Same time, same location (it’s either a virtual game night, or always hosted by the GM, or at the same FLGS). Barring holidays, emergencies, or the like, game night is always happening on this night.

If only the GM shows up, game night is composed of prep or worldbuilding. Or even solo roleplay in the style of Ironsworn or similar. Presumably this is the exception, and most nights involve other players. But there’s something powerful about the players knowing that even on a particular night when none of them could attend, the game is still "happening."

When one or more players can attend, they decide prior to the session (or right at the beginning) if they will continue the story from where the previous session left off, or start somewhere else. This will be obvious in some cases. If the same three players are attending two sessions in a row, they will probably want to pick up from last time. If a session is composed of four all-new players, they will presumably want to begin a new story.

But sometimes the session's frame won't be so obvious. If one long-running PC joins with several new ones, where do we place this story? Perhaps flash back to their past? Or forward to the future, relative to where they have spent most of their time? Will this be a side story, an amusing diversion? Or will subsequent sessions show that the original long-running game was only a prelude to an unexpected story?

Obviously this kind of game requires a different shared understanding of how we treat time and how we choose to frame "the present." This will be familiar to players who have done a lot of collaborative storytelling, but will take some practice for those accustomed to scenarios where only a GM has firm control over the frame. We should ask prior to each session, what are you most interested in exploring this time? Flashing back to before the story began? Or forward to the far future? Was there a part of the story we breezed through too quickly that we want to return to? Freeing the game from chronological rigidness opens up very interesting possibilities.

Knowing When to Roll Them and When to Show Them

I am a strong believer in rolling in the open. I don’t use a GM screen. I want the players to trust the oracular power of the dice, and to view me as a (reasonably) impartial arbiter.

But lately, I have been hiding a particular type of roll… at least, until it is time to reveal it.

Most ability checks in modern D&D (and similar skill-based systems for action resolution) resolve immediately. If a player rolls to jump over a chasm or pick a lock, success or failure is immediately apparent; if not from the number on the die itself, then certainly from the DM’s ensuing adjudication of that roll.

But for some ability checks – usually checks that are not connected to a discrete physical action – the output is not obvious within the fiction. A typical example is a PC searching a dungeon room for traps. When the DM says “hm, you don’t find anything,” the player interprets the statement differently if it comes on the heels of a high roll versus a low one. For many players, this produces a displeasing incongruity, where the result of the roll itself provides more information than it should.

This can be dealt with in various ways; for example, ensuring that all failed rolls essentially come with consequences beyond “you don’t find anything” or "nothing happens" (PBTA games, for example, incorporate these consequences in their 6-or-less results for players' moves). Old school D&D centers trap detection on careful exploration moreso than rolling dice, and ensures that a negative result is a punishment in itself, because every unproductive action costs the party time and increases the chance of a dangerous encounter or complication.

Modern D&D does not address this issue directly in the rules, and DMs try to fix it through various house rules and adjudication techniques. Some DMs will roll behind the screen on behalf of the player, but this is unsatisfying. Even if the player completely trusts the DM to relay their result accurately, it feels “off” for many players; they want to roll their own dice and control their own fate (even if dice provide only the illusion of control).

Dying to Find Out

So I have tried another solution – let the player roll, but hide the result until it is obvious to the character.

I was inspired by an idea that I saw somewhere online (and regrettably have not been able to find again to cite). The writer was attempting to fix a known issue with modern D&D’s death saving throws in combat situations; players have a good sense of how far from death a fallen character is at any given time, and will withhold healing until they know it's truly necessary. As in the trap-finding example, the dice are providing useful information to the players beyond what the characters would be able to perceive in the moment.

The writer’s solution was to keep the results of the death saving throws hidden from the other players until someone dedicated an action to helping the downed character (or combat ended). In their telling, combat immediately became riskier, and the players felt that characters on death’s door were suitably imperiled.

The same idea can be applied to other rolls of uncertain information. When a player rolls to find a trap, cover the result before anyone sees it (an opaque cup or similar object does the job nicely). Then peek at it, arch your eyebrow, and say, as usual, “hm, you don’t find any traps.” Don’t reveal the result until the players attempt traverse the potentially trapped area, or the situation changes such that the result of the roll is otherwise no longer relevant.

Some players may find this frustrating. I would use this as an invitation to steer them away from resolving challenges through ability checks, and back toward engaging with the fiction. Testing for traps or trying to attack the situation from a whole different angle is more interesting than brute-forcing a situation with ability checks.

Mystery History

This technique can be used for the DM’s rolls too, although it takes a different form. In one of the games I run, the characters came back together after time spent apart, dealing with their own issues and challenges. Each of them had unfinished business from their respective pasts that was liable to crop up at inconvenient times. 

To represent this, I roll a die at the beginning of each session, corresponding to the number of players (the result goes clockwise around the table). I cover the result and leave it in the center of the table, where everyone can see it. When these past complications intrude on the present (either because it simply makes sense based on events in the game, or because a random encounter/event die has triggered it) I reveal the result of the roll and describe how the character’s past is catching up with them.

Of course, this is mechanically no different than if I rolled the die at the time I needed to decide which PC was in the spotlight! Or for that matter, if I had rolled this during session preparation! The whole exercise in this instance is essentially showmanship. But it feels different. The hidden result sitting on the table creates anticipation (or dread) among the players. When it is revealed, it creates a spotlight moment for a particular character (while the others perhaps feel a bit of relief).

As with so many other things in TTRPGs, it pays to ask why we are rolling, and what effect we’re trying to achieve at the table. It simply leads to better games.

Jumping Through Time to Jump-Start the Game

Late last year I was asked to do a short run of sessions to wrap up a campaign that had lain dormant for 14 months.

It was very gratifying as a vote of confidence this is from the players. To go back to something that we hadn't touched in over a year and say, “I still want to know how that ends” is really amazing. I was honored – but also anxious that I wouldn't be able to return to the game in a way that would pay off the players’ amazing contributions over dozens of previous sessions of play.

It was challenging to think about how to revive a game that had been dormant for so long. I had never before tried to resuscitate a game that had lain cold for that long. It was different from kicking off a new game, or providing a fresh take on a recently active one.

The players understandably had a patchy recollection of what had happened in the run of sessions up to the hiatus, and only a vague sense of the campaign-wide events in the game. The new sessions had to not only be exciting and interesting on their own merits, but also resonate with dimly remembered details from the past.

What I found to be particularly useful was to propose that a long time had passed in-game, as well as out-of-game. The events of the first new session took place six in-game months after the last session the group played together. And that session began with the characters meeting again for the first time since shortly after the last pre-hiatus session.

This is by no means an original idea. Television shows do this all the time between seasons, for the same reason. If the characters are coming back together after time spent apart, their interactions organically remind the audience what was happening at the end of the last season. It also allows the characters to resolve some things offscreen; typically smaller goals, or downtime activities. The resulting session successfully brought the characters back into the present and oriented them toward their goal.