Gnome Stew

I love a good front. Of all the tools to come out of Powered by the Apocalypse games, fronts are probably one of my favorites. (Second only to clocks, really.) Because fronts allow me to keep track of everything from the arrival of the catastrophic doomsday event to the minor rival NPC’s petty revenge plot, and they give me the tools I need to not only figure out what the bad guys are up to but also how they’re going about their nefarious deeds.

(Confession: Even though I’ve read a bunch of Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark games, I’ve only ever run a single session of one (the original version of Dream Askew), and I’m pretty sure I ran it completely bass-ackwards. And yet my love of fronts endures.)

You know what else I love? Putting my PCs in positions of power. I love foisting eldritch artifacts or ancient magics onto their shoulders. I take glee in giving them influence within an important organization and seeing what they’ll do. It allows me to ask tough questions about how and when they use their great power responsibly (thanks, Uncle Ben). Plus, it gives my players the power to enact real change in the game – something all of us can sometimes feel powerless to do in our real lives. (My group’s go-to power fantasy is making the world a better place.)

These two loves, though – they are at odds with each other. At least, they are when it comes to my villains’ devious plotting because those fronts happen in the background. Yes, I can write down that Professor Bad Guy’s Ultimate Plan of Evil has six steps, and I can plant clues throughout the game’s narrative that could potentially lead my characters to put the pieces together and figure out his plan.

Still, I can be an anxious GM at times, worrying that my clues are too obtuse or that my players will reach the wrong conclusion. And if I fail to deliver, then they’ll fail to figure it out in time, and The Ultimate Plan will succeed without the players having had a chance to thwart it.

Now, I know some games have done a wonderful job of systematizing when fronts advance. Still, when you’re porting the concept into a game that doesn’t already have them baked into the mechanics, you’re basically running that background minigame on vibes. And on the one hand the GM can basically do whatever they want (as long as it serves the story and creates a good time for their players).

But on the other hand, the GM can basically do whatever they want, and oh gods, I was already working with themes of using power responsibly, so now I’m second-guessing my second guesses!

GIVE THEM A WAR ROOM

Fronts are meant to be a GM-facing tool — a little mini-game the GM plays with themself between sessions. When I run games, I like to flip it around and, instead, give the players a “war room.”

Maybe it’s an actual war room in the command center of their base. Maybe it’s an oracle-like NPC or familiar that keeps track of their enemies’ actions. Maybe it’s the murder board in their detectives’ office. Regardless, all of these war rooms have one thing in common – the threat map.

Just like fronts, the threat map is a big circle with all of the campaign’s (known) threats arranged around it like a clock. At the center of the circle are the PCs (or their town, their ship, their community, what-have-you). Each threat has it’s own number of steps, and as those steps are completed, they get filled in from the outer rim, moving towards the PCs in the center.

At the end of each session, I show my players the threat map, and together, we discuss what threats they addressed and those threats don’t advance (or get crossed off if they eliminated it).

The ones they didn’t deal with, though. Those tick down. Getting closer and closer to completion.

Of course, the threat map is fluid. As they discover more threats, they’re added to it. When they eliminate one of the threats, it’s removed.

A war room with a threat map gives your players several things – it gives the players a feeling of control (or at least the potential to feel in control), it gives them a way to prioritize the most immediate threats in the game world, and gives them a core list from which they can build out what they know about the villains’ schemes. It basically gives them a quest log.

Depending on the tone of the game and just how many enemies the players have made, I may also introduce a mitigation mechanic – some way for them to delay a threat without actually dealing with it in the session. Sometimes, it’s a die role at the end of the game. Other times, it’s a resource cost. (This is also a great place to use an NPC delegation system.)

Because while the threat map can keep your players focused on the main tasks at hand, it can sometimes make them too focused. Any mitigation mechanic you introduce will allow them to breathe and indulge in ancillary role-play that wanders a bit.   

IT’S NOT FOR EVERYONE

I don’t always use a player-facing threat map when I run games. It works best in games where your players have the means to not just react to dangers but also get out ahead of them. I wouldn’t use this tool in games like Shiver or Camp Murder Lake, for example, because those games are about not being in control.

That said, introducing the threat map at a point in the game where the characters have crossed a certain power threshold could be a great way of driving home the fact that they’ve got bigger responsibilities now.

THE LAST THING I LOVE

Besides my spouse, my dog, and my library of books and games, I love one other thing — a good template.

Here’s the threat map I used when I was running Starfinder. Feel free to download it and make it your own, and tell me how you think you might incorporate player-facing threat maps into your next campaign!

Ang gets JT and Walt on the mics to learn more about what the OSR (Old School… Renaissance? Revival? Retro? The R varies) actually is. Join us and learn more about this style of roleplaying game.

Links:

JT’s Amazon Book Page

Origins Game Fair

Renegade Game Studios

One of my gaming groups plays a mashed up game with three genres: Highschool, Swashbuckling, and Urban Fantasy. We call it Children of the Shroud. In the game we play high school kids in a hidden magic world. As part of our magical learning we are part of the Junior Guardians club. It’s a club for magical students at our high school in Buffalo NY. Due to reasons, we got ourselves involved in trying to stop a magic prosperity cult who are using the in-game currency of a video game called Call of Violence to try and manifest a new primal elemental of prosperity. This in-game currency can be bought with real world money. Prosperity magic is outlawed by the magic cops because it can destroy the magical veil which helps hide the magical world from the normals out there. If those normals found out about the magical world they’d get really torch and pitchforky on the magic folks. 

Our characters are…interesting. My character, Silas, had his girlfriend’s essence bound to his soul when the campaign started and has been trying to make her whole again. Ti is a medusa in a really nice middle class family of medusas. Gunny just figured out he was a wind elemental and his dad isn’t dead, but some big bad criminal, or spy, or both. On top of that we can all manifest magical weapons that let us cast stronger and stronger spells the longer we fight, and two of us are also on the academic decathlon team at school, or the Knowledge Bowl team, as our friend Ti likes to say.

It’s a mashup. So let’s talk about how you can do something similar.

Pick Genres

First, pick three genres. Need a list? You can try TV tropes or here’s a bunch of genre’s to pick from: 

Action, Adventure, Comedy, Crime, Espionage, Fairy Tale, Hard SciFi, High Fantasy, High School, Historical, Horror, Low Fantasy, Martial Arts or Wuxia (It’s Woo-Shhaaa, say it with me, Woo. Shhaaa.) Mecha, Medical, Medieval, Modern, Mystery, Politics, Post-Apocalypse, Prehistoric (who doesn’t love a big old dinosaur), Psionics, your favorite version of the punk genre, Pulp, Science Fantasy, Soft SciFi, Space Opera, Sports (we need more sports RPGs), Suburbia, Super Heroes, Sword & Sorcery, Urban Fantasy, Western, Zombies AKA Hordes of shambling dead people where the shambling dead are the least dangerous thing.

Understand Your Genres

Second, understand what your genres are about. Let’s look at the Children of the Shroud game I mentioned. I’ll be quoting the Cortex Prime rule book for their take on the first two genres:

High School: Teenagers are complicated, and so are the adults that share their worlds, especially when the drama is dialed all the way up because of exams, proms, drugs, and bullies.

Swashbuckler: Icons of this genre are pirates, musketeers, and scoundrels, but it really extends to anything where the characters engage in flashy exploits, daring escapes, over the top swordfights, and perilous relationships.

There isn’t an Urban Fantasy genre in the Cortex book but here’s my best take on it.

Urban Fantasy: often deals with a world of magic in a modern setting. Most Urban Fantasy has a mystery at the center of these stories, leaning on its roots in noir fiction, but the genre is primarily about mixing the magical with a mundane world and seeing how they interact. The PCs should also have one foot in both the magical and mundane worlds.

Fit Those Genres Together – Largest Step

Third, try and look at how the genres can fit together. This examination also lets you take a genre to a different sub genre or lets you add a sub genre. Once again, here’s how we did it with Children of the Shroud.

In our Children of the Shroud game we decided everyone would have a magical weapon of some sort that they manifested, and the weapon would generate mana as it was wielded through different forms for combat magic. That was the intersection of Swashbuckling and Urban Fantasy. It also let me push a bit of the high school magic animes I enjoy into the game.

We decided we wanted ritual magic that took longer to use but was more flexible than combat magic and could produce a variety of effects. This strictly fits the Urban Fantasy genre.

Our GM, and fellow Gnome, Phil, created something called the Shroud, which hid the magical world from the mundane world but it could be strained if magic was used too blatantly. This also meant there was a governing body over magic in the world (the Veil), who helped maintain the Shroud and investigated and prosecuted those who sought to expose the Shroud or use magic in a way that would harm it. This pushed us to a hidden magical world as part of our urban fantasy genre. 

To help make this hidden world, urban fantasy, and high school genre even more poignant and overlapped, we placed the parents of our characters as part of this magical society in some way. On top of that, Gunny’s player decided his mother doesn’t know anything about the magical world, creating some hidden world genre tension.

Next we crafted mechanics that pulled in school cliques to highlight the high school school side of play. We called them Roles. This is a feature of Cortex Prime. Our Roles trait set includes Emo, Geek, Jock, Popular, and Performer. They provided attributes, but also our social standing in different school cliques. This is predominantly a highschool thing, but the mechanics also played into the action parts of our swashbuckling since Jock and Geek were used in our dueling rules.

We also decided our high school would be mostly mundane, but there would be a special club called the Junior Guardians that was a cover for the magical teens attending the school. This club would be where they got their magical education. This hits the high school and urban fantasy genres along with that hidden world sub genre.

Lastly, we have our important relationships. We started with two in the magical world and two in the mundane world to keep up the idea of being in both worlds from Urban Fantasy. Also, because one of the genres is Swashbuckling our GM decided to also do their best to make some of those relationships dangerous in a variety of ways.

There’s actually more to it than that, I just threw a bunch of examples of what we did at you. If you break it down there’s really just three things the group needs to consider and one extra the GM should keep in mind. Time for a sub list.

Setting

Your setting should do its best to find these overlaps. As human beings we’re pretty good at finding the patterns and intersections where these different genres and their setting elements can intersect. Just ask yourself a few questions such as:

• Where are the predominant locations the game will take place?
• Who are the important NPCs and how do they fit into the setting?
• Why are people or organizations doing what they’re doing? What’s their motivation?
• Where is the tension and conflict in the setting and how can it be related to the genres being used?

That’s just off the top of my head. Add questions that work best for your group and creative style.

Situation

An addendum to the setting would be situation. What is the initial situation the characters find themselves in or what is the overall situation the game assumes the characters will be involved in? Some folks think of this as a scenario or plot but it’s a little higher level than that. It’s more of a guideline for the players so they more easily craft characters inside the campaign. It also gives starting tensions, problems, and ways for the GM to provide meaningful hooks for the PCs.

In our Children of the Shroud game we were all a part of the Junior Guardians, which meant we had Junior Guardian missions we had to take part in. On top of that we had personal goals the GM ok’ed as part of the initial situation. Silas had his girlfriend Meseme’s essence bound to his soul and was dealing with the fallout from that. Gunny had just discovered he was magical, and that his dead father wasn’t dead and was also magical.

Mechanics

Your mechanics need to find ways to fit the overlaps. Cortex Prime made this easier because we built a game using the Cortex Legos. It was a little more upfront work but made for a very fun experience.The relationships, the roles, our dueling rules, how magic affected the Shroud, and our magic ritual rules all touched on the genres we chose in some way.

You can look around for a game that just does what you’re looking for. If you want a pulpy weird west with a dash of horror game, you can play Deadlands. But if you’re trying something where it’s not quite as obvious, or there’s not a game that fits what you’re looking for, it’s time to break out some house rules, hacks, and drifts. It’s a whole discussion on it’s own, but here’s a couple ideas for how to go about it:

• Utilize the core mechanisms of the game to build the things you believe you need to make the game fit the genre.
• Adapt mechanics and ideas from other games to the game you prefer.
• Combine the above two ideas.

What I would advise against is excluding rules for things that would be important to the genre and just leaving it up to interactions at the table. Of course, if your table is ok with GM fiat as a final arbiter for important decisions and moments in the game, then you should do that. Every table is different in what they enjoy.

Characters

Your characters should be crafted with the genres in mind, along with the above mentioned situation. Genres have character tropes that fit inside of them and story tropes which help drive character action. Here’s a solid way to come up with an interesting character for a genre mash game. Let’s do an original from Children of the Shroud:

• Start with a character archetype from one of the genres or pick two and mash them together
  • Manic Pixie Girl with sleep magic (High School / Urban Fantasy) She’s very pro Veil (Hidden World)
• Put a spin on it
  • She’s really pretty anxious about talking to people about things that matter unless it’s in her dream space. (High School / Urban Fantasy)
• Pick some kind of story arc you’d like your character to go on
  • Will she still see the Veil as the bastion of order, law, and good she believes it to be after working inside of it? (Swashbuckling / Urban Fantasy)
• Then play to the motivations of the character, the ideas of the trope, the idea of the story arc, and the spin.

The above example isn’t really an original, it’s a character named Bo who’s a much more prominent NPC in our game these days. She’s part of the Junior Guardians which is how our PCs know her, and she went to the Prom with Ti. This is just the story I would envision for her if I was playing her.

Together these steps will give a way to make a character that fits into the game you’ve mashed together.

Scenarios

Lastly, let’s talk about Scenarios. It’s actually the easiest part because you just look at the plots and tropes those kinds of genre stories have and build scenarios utilizing them as foundations. Then you can add some interesting bits from your characters, setting, and situation, utilizing your genre tropes where appropriate, and you have yourself a genre mashed scenario.

Phil did this quite expertly in our 3rd Children of the Shroud story, Smarty Pants. We started with an academic decathlon against a rival school (High School). Silas spied a student on the opposing team, Lowell Thornton, using a magical Altoid to give himself a temporary intellect boost during their one-on-one trivia battle. Thing is, Lowell isn’t magical (Urban Fantasy). On top of that, before we started the story Phil asked us about how we knew our friend Morris who died at a party at Lowell’s house this past summer, drowning in Lowell’s pool (Swashbuckling – Perilous Relationship). I told Phil my character was really tight with Morris, who was the one who introduced Silas to Meseme, my girlfriend whose soul is cohabiting my body (Highschool / Urban Fantasy). We come to find out that the Altoids were imbued with the essence of Morris, who had his soul sucked out of him in a magical ritual (Urban Fantasy). So now our characters are running down who sold the Altoids to Lowell which leads to who tried to kill Meseme in the same way (Swashbuckling / Urban Fantasy). During the entire story Silas is having emotional anger issues. His friends are doing what they can to deal with it, but tensions are high (High School). There’s a running battle in the park with one of the essence dealers, but she gets away (Swashbuckling). Hard conversations are had but eventually Silas’s friends, Ti and Gunny, help Silas commune with Meseme within his soul, which helps calm him down, and three are able to track down and bring some of the people involved with taking people’s essence to justice(High School / Urban Fantasy). This was, of course, in a huge sword fight in an abandoned asylum for the mentally ill in the city of Buffalo, NY (Swashbuckling). Yes, we have one of those here. It’s real.

Now that you have the list, here’s the most important thing to keep in mind. These items aren’t necessarily done in order. You’ll most likely need to bounce around to each of them, getting little bits of information, making choices, asking questions, and filling things out until you have a clear enough picture to proceed with whatever might be the next logical step in your genre mashup.

Session 0 or Session -1

To help this process you might want to gather your game group for this genre mash. Session 0’s are great for this, or even session -1 where you’re just hashing out the above items. There’s a lot to talk about, but here’s a starting list of things to think about when having this discussion.

Genre

• Which genres are we going to use?
• What do the genres mean to each person? 
• Where do the genres overlap?

Setting

• What do the genre overlaps mean for the setting? 
• Is the setting original or something created whole cloth? 
• Who’s building or deciding on the setting? Is it a group effort? Is the GM going to take point and get input from the rest of the group, or will you use some other methodology? 
• What’s the initial situation for the characters going to look like?

Mechanics

• What mechanics are you going to use? 
• How do they fit your genre mashup? 
• How don’t they fit your genre mashup? 
• Are you planning on hacking them to make them fit better? 

It can feel like a lot, but I find this kind of effort to be a fun creative exercise, regardless of whether you’re doing most of it alone or with your group. In my experience, if you just follow the flow of answers and questions as they come up, and refer to the above questions as you find yourself getting stuck, you’ll have a pretty easy time with this.

I will provide one more bit of advice. If you’re the GM and are doing this exercise with your group, I would suggest facilitating this part just like you run the game. Ask a question, get some answers, take some notes. Always do your best to provide and get clarifications on things that are said. Also, don’t be afraid to say no to things that don’t fit together, or ask the group how those pieces that don’t look like they fit together actually do fit together. You should do your best to control the pace and when things bog down, utilize the people in your group to get unstuck.

I just want to say thanks if you’ve read this far. Let me recap the steps I think about when putting together a genre mash game.

Recap

First, pick three genres.

Second, understand what your genres are about.

Third, try and look at how the genre’s can fit together and if you need to take a genre to a slightly different sub genre. When doing this you should think about these things:

• Setting. The people, places, important history, and current events of the game. These should all reinforce one or more of the genres.
• Situation. This is the initial set of circumstances the characters will find themselves in.
• Characters. Player characters that fit inside the genre and can be protagonists in the game.
• Mechanics. Mechanisms and procedures that make sense with and enhance the genres of the game you’re playing.
• Scenario. Build scenarios using the aforementioned elements along with the plots and story beats used in the genres you’re mashing up.

Once you’ve done that you have yourself a genre mashed game.

Now let me ask you. What kind of Genre Mashups have you put together? How did you do it? How would you enhance what I’ve presented?

When starting to design an adventure for your home group, the first things I always consider are the mood, tone, and theme of the adventure. This will dictate all design decisions, descriptions, monsters included, sometimes the treasure gained, and the general aesthetics of everything I create for the adventure.

Before I jump in, you’ll note that I’m leaving genre out of this list because I’m assuming you already have an established genre for the game you’re running for your group. If you’re working with a “clean slate” (meaning no campaign in flight for this adventure), then you really should determine the genre(s) you’re going to take into account for this adventure. Picking the genre first will drive many of the tropes, assumptions, styles, and approaches for storytelling within the adventure.

Having said all of that, I’m going to delve into mood, tone, and theme, in that order. I truly feel that one leads to the next that leads to the next. I always do them in this order.

Mood

This is the emotional resonance of the adventure. This encompasses the presentation of the material and the feels you want to evoke in your players by way of their characters’ experiences. I highly encourage you to head over to David Hodder’s web site and look at the top “emotion wheel” he has posted there. You’ll start with the innermost level of the wheel and pick an emotion. Then drill toward the outer edges to find more precise emotions.

I recommend having several moods/emotions chosen for your adventure, but make sure they’ll mesh together or have one lead to another. Sometimes, an adventure can present different moods at different stages of the adventure. Perhaps the adventure starts with a village celebration (jubilation) that gets invaded by nearby ravagers (panic) until the party of adventurers restores calm (content). However, during the invasion, the beloved mayor of the village is slain (rage/hate), so the adventurers take it upon themselves to venture into the nearby wilderness to put an end to the ravagers once and for all (stimulated). When they successfully return from their mission (satisfied), the villagers heap glory and accolades upon them (relieved/passion).

Tone

The tone of the adventure is how things are presented to the GM and the players. I’m assuming the GM is you, so you’ll want to make sure your notes, ideas, writings, and concepts reflect the tone you want to present to the players. By approaching your writing of notes with a specific tone in mind, you’ll be more consistent in your presentation of that tone to the players.

Some examples of tones for adventures are:

• Optimistic
• Pessimistic
• Joyful
• Sadness
• Fearful
• Hopeful
• Humorous
• Serious
• Horrific
• Mundane
• Warmongering
• Peaceful
• Weird
• Normal

Theme

The theme of your adventure can, I would argue should, borrow from literary themes. They are well-established, well-researched, and in many places are thoughtfully presented for your education. There are numerous lists of themes on the Internet. A quick search for “story themes” will produce gobs of results. Set a timer for 20-30 minutes before doing any research like this to avoid wasting hours down “the Internet rabbit hole.”

The lists of literary themes are so numerous and lengthy, I’m not going to try and reproduce them here. Instead, I’m giving you the above homework of doing your own research. I just don’t have the space or word count here to even sum up themes that can be applied to adventure creation.

Most of the themes are going to reflect how your PCs interact with the events and situations in your adventure. If you come up with your theme and then design an encounter that doesn’t support or mirror that theme, then the encounter might feel like a waste of time to the PCs. If you can tie every setting, every encounter, most NPCs, and the story arcs to your theme, the adventure will feel more like a cohesive whole rather than random bits tied together with string.

Taking my above example of the ravagers attacking the village during a celebration followed by the PCs tracking down the ravagers in the wilderness and putting an end to them, I would propose that my theme should be something along the lines of “righteous justice.” However, if I shift things around a bit and have the ravagers motivated by their leader’s love for the mayor’s daughter, the theme can change to “unrequited love.” If the daughter loves the leader back, it changes again to “fated love.” If there is no love element in the story arc, but the ravagers are going through a famine and just needed some food the villagers wouldn’t (or couldn’t) sell to the men and women in the wilderness, then you have a “survival” theme. This can be especially true if the famine of the wilderness is creeping toward the village and its farmlands.

The key is to pick a theme to run with, so that it can properly inform and color your story as you put the pieces together.

Changes Over Arcs

I’m also going to add on here that if you have multiple “acts” or “story arcs” within your adventure, you can have a different theme (or mood or tone) for each act of the adventure. I’m mainly working off the assumption that your adventure is a single act, but if it’s longer, then you can definitely have multiple choices going on here. The longer your adventure, the more opportunity you have to explore different aspects of storytelling within your plans.

Stay Tuned!

Next month, I’m going to tackle a concept that I came up with (though it’s probably not unique) called “designing back to front.” I hope you liked this article and stick with me for the next one.

Licensed games usually take the approach of presenting material that can happen far away from the canon events of the setting. This works especially well in settings like Star Trek or Star Wars, where there is a literal galaxy of locations available for storytelling. Player characters may hear about canon events, and there may be a butterfly effect on some of their options, but the assumption of the game is that the player characters aren’t going to be directly confronting and potentially contradicting the fictitious history of the setting.

Despite this, there are some fans who want exactly that. If they are playing in a game about a given setting, they want to be present for the events they have read about or seen on screen. They may or may not want to step into the shoes of an existing character, either by playing that character, or by playing a character that replaces the canon character in the game table’s narrative. If you want to play through a campaign where it’s possible for Luke Skywalker to miss the shot that destroys the Death Star because a PC failed to keep a TIE Fighter off his tail, that’s largely on the game facilitator to navigate.

Modiphius has taken an interesting approach to this with their Dune: Adventures in the Imperium RPG. While it largely assumes that player characters will be engaging in house politics in other corners of the galaxy or touching upon Arrakis in moments between galaxy shaking events, it has also introduced products that directly engage the canon narrative. The primary example of this has been the Agents of Dune boxed set, which places the player characters and their house in the place of House Atreides, inheriting Dune from the Harkonnens by decree of the emperor.

The adventure we’re looking at today also places player characters directly in the path of galactic history, presenting a campaign that takes place just before, during, and in the aftermath of Paul Atreides’ takeover of the imperial throne.

 Dune: Fall of the Imperium

Creative Lead Andrew Peregrine
Line Editor/Canon Editor Rachel J. Wilkinson
Writing Richard August, Simon Berman, Jason Brick, Jason Durall, Keith Garrett, Jack Norris, Andrew Peregrine, Dave Semark, Hilary Sklar, Devinder Thiara, Mari Tokuda, Rachel J. Wilkinson
Graphic Design Chris Webb, Leigh Woosey, Jen Mccleary
Art Direction Rocío Martín Pérez
Cover Artist David Benzal
Interior Artwork Artists Amir Zand, Joel Chaim Holtzman, János Tokity, Simone Rizzo, Jakub Kozlowski, Carmen Cornet, Eren Arik, Hans Park, Mikhail Palamarchuk, Mihail Spil-Haufter, Lixin Yin, Susanah Grace, Alexander Guillen Brox, Imad Awan, Louie Maryon, Justin Usher, Jonny Sun, Olivier Hennart, Pat Fix, Avishek Banerjee, Bastien Lecouffe-Deharme, Simone Rizzo
Proofreading Stuart Gorman
Project Management Daniel Lade
Brand Management Joe Lefavi for Genuine Entertainment

Disclaimer

I am not working from a review copy of this product and did not receive a review copy to work from. I have received review copies from Modiphius Entertainment in the past. I have not had the opportunity to play or run this adventure. I do have a familiarity with the 2d20 system, having run and played multiple iterations of the rules.

Layout and Design

I am working from a PDF of the adventure. The adventure is available as a PDF or a physical book. Additionally, there is a Roll20 version of the adventure for sale. The PDF is 146 pages long. The content of those pages breaks down to this:

• Covers–2 pages
• Inside Front Cover Art–1 page
• Company Title Page–1 page
• Product Title Page–1 page
• Credits Page–1 page
• Table of Contents–1 page
• Shuttle Map–1 page
• Map of Arrakeen–1 page
• Modiphius Product Ads–3 pages

There is some glorious artwork in this book, and the design of most of the outfits, vehicles, architecture, etc. match the recent movies. While this book assumes the continuity of the original novels, the licensing is all bound together, meaning they don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to producing artwork. The pages are in a light parchment color, with geometric flourishes under the text. There is artwork throughout, especially depicting notable characters. Each of the chapters starts with a two-page spread of full color art.

The layout varies depending on the purpose of the text. Most of the adventure is in a two-column layout, but background material and overviews are formatted in centered text boxes or single columns that run down the middle of the page. Sidebars are often in the lower right- or left-hand side of the page.

The Judge of the Change

This adventure is the framework for an entire campaign, if you couldn’t glean that from the introduction. The book itself is broken into the following sections:

• Introduction
• Act I: The Gathering Storm
• Act II: Muad’Dib
• Act III: Fall of the Imperium
• Act IV: War Across a Million Worlds
• Adventures in the Era of Muad’Dib

Adventures in the Era of Muad’Dib is a section that details the kind of setting assumptions that should be considered for playing the RPG during the establishment of Paul’s reign. This includes the differences between the chaos and violence of that era, contrasted against the political maneuvering and quick betrayals of the previous era.

Each act of the campaign has its own set of acts, which are the primary adventures that characters will engage with as that leg of the campaign progresses. This means that within all four acts, there are three adventures, each with their own three acts.

While I mentioned the Agents of Dune campaign boxed set above, unlike that product, these adventures assume that the events of the novels happen when and how they are detailed in the source material. There are a few notes on what might happen if the GM and the players want to deviate from the story, but most sections assume that the path of history rolls forward unabated.

Who Are You?

The PCs are playing agents of their own house, managing their interests in light of emerging events. For several parts of the campaign, this means you’ll be dealing with the cascading effects of galactic history, rather than being right next to it. However, there are several places where the adventure narrows back down to canon events so the PCs can be present as witnesses.

There is an interesting sidebar at the beginning of the adventure which I both agree with and think oversimplifies the situation, especially when it’s applied to the players and the decisions they are making. The sidebar mentions that both Paul and the Harkonnens are nobles whose people toil for the profit of their rulers, and that while the Harkonnens are vicious and violent in their tactics, Paul starts a war that kills billions of people. All on board with “Paul isn’t the Good Guy.” But it also frames this as “there are no villains,” which, no, that’s harder to take. Paul isn’t the good guy because of the repercussions of his actions, but it is hard to say that the Harkonnens aren’t villains. I think it’s pretty easy to conceive of a story where there are no heroes, only villains, rather than saying there are no heroes or villains.

Part of why this sidebar exists, however, is to reinforce the concept that making decisions for a House in the Landsraad often means choosing between multiple bad options. If the PCs ally with the Harkonnens for a time, they aren’t suddenly the villains of the story, they may just be doing something very distasteful for them in order to help their house survive. There are several places in the narrative where characters have the option of throwing in with different houses against other houses, which means being allied doesn’t always mean being long term friends or business partners.

As agents of a Landsraad House, there are a combination of missions you can undertake for the betterment of your house, which also happens to give you insight into the greater events unfolding. For example, trying to secure a hidden smuggler’s cache of spice after the Atreides take over Arrakis lets you stumble upon some Harkonnen records that may lead you to the hidden base of operations of a Sardukar agent, and so on.

While the adventure has several places where events unfold at a distance from the events of the novels, there are a few key places where the PCs are funneled back into the main narrative. These include:

• The night House Atreides falls
• The Death of Rabban
• The Death of Leto II
• The sequence of Paul’s ascension to the throne and all the events surrounding it

If you read “The Death of Leto II,” and thought, wait, I don’t want to be there for that, I completely understand. That particular aspect of the adventure kind of underscores some of the problems the adventure has whenever it funnels the PCs back to major canon events. It’s very clear you are pushed into those events to witness them. If you play the adventure as written, you are sent with the Sardukar on their raid of the sietch, and you arrive at the scene just after Leto II has been killed.

In many of the “up close to history” scenes, your characters are rolling to avoid getting in anyone’s way and hoping to pick up some things beneficial to your house on the periphery of bigger events. One exception to this is the death of Rabban. The PCs have several paths to this point, but almost all of them involve someone wanting them to kill Rabban in the lead up to the most tumultuous events preceding Paul’s ascension.

This would be a really neat, “that was your characters!” moment, except there are still some heavy handed sections where his location is a bait and switch, so you must encounter Feyd, and you can’t kill Rabban all by yourselves, Gurney Halleck will show up and either try to do it before you, or help you out.

The Wide-Open Galaxy

Act II is especially open compared to the rest of the adventure. Your characters are negotiating for spice as Harkonnen production slows. You chase spies on a ski resort planet. You skulk around backwaters looking for blackmail information and encrypted documents. In one of my favorite moments in the adventure, your characters navigate a night of betrayal that is both thematically calling back to the attack on House Atreides, but both more subtle and distinct. It’s one of those places where it really feels like the adventure delivers you a very “Dune” experience without just using canon Dune events.

Act IV is strange. While it deals with events we know happened, broadly, i.e. Paul’s crusade ravaging worlds that failed to show their loyalty, the places where these adventures take place generally don’t have a lot of canon surrounding them, meaning that the PCs actions can have greater effect. The downside is that in many cases, the reason they are in the path of these events is very thin. In several cases, Paul issues an imperial decree for the PCs to go to a place, where they may work against his agents, and the next time they see Paul, “he sees something in their future that keeps him from acting against them,” and then they can go somewhere else and either discreetly or overtly defy him.

The culmination of the entire adventure/campaign is that a House that has long been associated with the PCs’ House is accused of treason. The PCs can find out what is going on, disassociate themselves from their allies or exonerate them, and determine who to screw over and who to align themselves with to keep one of Paul’s lieutenants from declaring their House as an enemy of the throne.

Mechanical Resolution

An aspect of the adventure that I really enjoy is that it leans into the 2d20 concept of creating traits. If you aren’t familiar with traits in a 2d20 game (which have slightly different names depending on the 2d20 game in question), they function in a manner similar to Fate aspects. They are a broad description of something that is true. Depending on the narrative, traits either grant narrative permission to do something that wouldn’t be possible if the trait weren’t active, or it adds or subtracts from the difficulty of a task if it is relevant to that task.

Depending on how the PCs resolve different scenes in the adventure, they may acquire different traits, which will be available for use either by the PCs or the GM if they are still active. For example, in many cases, PCs that ally with a house will gain a trait that denotes that they are “Ally of House X,” and any time that’s relevant, it might make a check either more or less difficult. They may also gain traits that reflect their reputation; for example, if they resolve a scene by hiding, they may get a “Cowardice” trait, which might come into play whenever dealing with characters that are proud of their martial accomplishments.

There are also events that remove traits. For example, early in the adventure, it’s a lot easier for the PCs to pick up the “Ally to House Harkonnen” trait, which they may end up shedding if, later in the adventure, they advocate for the emperor to strip them of their rights to Arrakis.

Like Star Trek Adventures, Dune: Adventures in the Imperium makes provisions for a player running characters other than their primary character, usually in circumstances where the PCs wouldn’t want to personally be involved in the activities they are directing. This is separate from, but adjacent to, Architect play, where PCs can say they are using resources from a distance to manipulate events, making checks for broad actions they are taking, to influence events.

For example, if a character has troops as one of their resources, and there have been smugglers raiding their holdings, they could use Architect mode to send troops to take care of the smugglers without ever going to that location, rolling to see how well their orders are carried out versus the difficulty of the outcome they want. The downside to Architect play being that it’s hard to get specific granular results. In the example above, you might be able to get rid of the smugglers, but the GM may tell you that unless you show up yourself, you can’t expect your troops to capture a smuggler alive for interrogation.

There are a few places in the adventure where broader goals are mentioned as something the PCs might attempt with Architect mode, usually in the periphery of events that surround the political maneuvering in Act II. There are also a few brief mentions of using supporting characters during certain events, especially if the player character in question isn’t a particularly martial specimen, and they tackle a mission like killing Rabban.

Because these are excellent tools, I wish the adventure had spent more time expanding how they could be used to greater effect in various scenes. While I don’t think any scene where the PCs have most of their agency removed is going to be fun to sit through, I could see several of the “you must go this direction” encounters being easier to swallow if those scenes were expressly meant to be carried out by secondary character operatives. I suspect that this wasn’t done in part because the adventure wants your primary PCs to be present at these major events, not just a character you are playing.

Having a few lines referencing, “they could get X, likely through Architect play,” isn’t nearly as satisfying as a more detailed list of resources or events that the PCs could undertake that had a direct effect on the narrative and the position of their house in each act.

Aftermath

When I first saw there was a section on Adventures in the Era of Muad’Dib, I was thinking something along the lines of the one-page mission briefs from Star Trek Adventures. This is, more precisely, tools and mechanics available to reflect the differences in the galaxy after Paul’s ascension to the throne and the spread of his religion. It introduces the faction template for the Qizarate, as well as six new talents that are either tied to that faction or involve interaction with Paul directly.

While there aren’t “mission brief” style adventures, there are sections on what resistance to the throne looks like in this era, some of the espionage that might be going on, and a few adventure seeds surrounding interacting with Paul, the adherents of his faith, and the changing allegiances in the Imperium. These are generally short, one paragraph long descriptions.

 I feel like you’re either going to have some frustrating moments as written, or you’re going to be reworking some key scenes so that the PCs have actual agency in those moments 

The Mystery of Life Isn’t a Problem to Solve, But A Reality to Experience

I really appreciate the ambition of this adventure. It really shines in Act II, and a bit in Act IV, where the PCs have lots of options available to them, and the main thing that is determined by canon are the stakes they are navigating. I absolutely love the Night of Slow blades section of the adventure, because it hits that sweet spot of “this is tailored for your PCs” and “this feels like exactly what would happen in the novels.” There are also some other scenes across various acts that shine. While not everyone may take the road that leads to this, I really liked the details of negotiating with Baron Harkonnen, as well as the scenes where the PCs can debate with other agents of the Landsraad houses in court with the emperor.

An Animal Caught in A Trap Will Gnaw Off Its Own Leg to Escape. What Will You Do?

I wish that when the adventure pushes the PCs into “witness” mode, there was more for them to do than observe and make a few checks to see if they pick up a new trait or asset for themselves or their house. There are some brushes with canon events early on that feel especially frustrating. You may get into a fight with Rabban the night of the Atreides attack, but he’s got plot armor. You might see Jessica and Paul being herded onto an ornithopter in the distance, but you’re too far away to do anything about it. The absolute worse example of this is being present for Leto II’s death. I don’t expect the adventure to give you the opportunity to stop this from happening–it’s a pretty pivotal story beat. But I don’t know that my desire to witness the noteworthy events of Dune included helplessly traveling with the people that murder Paul’s infant son.

Tenuous Recommendation–The product has positive aspects, but buyers may want to make sure the positive aspects align with their tastes before moving this up their list of what to purchase next.

I don’t want to be too brutal. I think that if you are a fan of Dune (and I’m not sure why you would be buying Dune RPG material if you weren’t) you will find some use for this adventure. On the other hand, I feel like you’re either going to have some frustrating moments as written, or you’re going to be reworking some key scenes so that the PCs have actual agency in those moments. That’s a shame, because there are some wonderful moments in the adventure that tie the PCs and their house to events with a little more room to breathe, that would be great to see attached to an adventure that didn’t funnel you back into your front row seats for a show you can’t really affect.

Ang, Chris and Josh chat about mixing up genres in our RPGs and as a result touch on what genre is, and why we can and should mash it all up together!

Links:

D&D Lego!

The Nebula Awards

Daggerheart Playtest

Try all the options

We are all familiar with the trope of a regular gaming group. You know, the one who meets on regular days in the regular gaming location. And while the particularities of the imagined group differ, the factors of time and space stay constant, but so too does the cast. Although we all know how wonderful a regular gaming group can be, I am here to suggest that there’s several benefits of regularly shifting up the cast around your gaming table as well. I will discuss the pros of this, and of course mention some of the cons while suggesting how they can be remedied or at least reduced. I might even suggest that shifting up your regular gaming group will just mean you’ll have a regular gaming circle, but that’s getting ahead of myself. I’ll discuss the benefits of not having a regular group first.

Scheduling

People’s lives change, along with their calendars, interests and priorities, and unfortunately also health and postal codes. Having a steady group is all well and good, but sometimes scheduling games will take a lot of effort. For a lot of us that’s where the real issue of burnout comes from, with a tedious and complicated scheduling matrix, and the accompanying cancellations. I find that it’s much easier to fit people to dates I’m available instead of finding people first and then looking at the calendars. I’d rather play shorter campaigns for six months or so, than risk having campaigns end in scheduling limbo, due to peoples changing lives and priorities. It’s much easier to find a date that works for all if the group is brought together on the same premise and not just out of habit. If everyone assembled for your Weird Western-game is really wanting to play weird western and have all cleared the same date in the week, you are more certain that they will attend game nights than if they’re just your friends, have other hobbies and are really just wanting you all to go back to playing a Fantasy or a Cyberpunk game again. Sure, people will still have emergencies, or just family or work commitments, but if you have a robust group bound together on a mission, you might at least get to finish the campaign together, at the very least experience a somewhat satisfactory ending, even if things keep happening. Oh, and as a bonus, you also have at least one friend who is eagerly awaiting the start of the next Fantasy or Cyberpunk campaign!

Different Experiences

While monogamy has its virtues, I find that gaming with a richer and more varied crowd brings a lot of benefits to myself, the other individuals and the group as a whole, while also benefiting a larger circle of people. We avoid the rut that a steady group will sometimes attain, and variations in cast give different players the chance to try out different roles/functions/classes that some players tend to monopolize. Like the players who will “always” play “The Face” character, but the GM knows that one of the shyer players has talked about playing one for a long time. This might also include the one who will always play the lone magical talent or the baddest of the baddest combatant as well. Also, I believe new blood opens up for new perspectives, ideas and challenges, and that the table dynamics won’t get stale. New players also mean new approaches, new words and maybe something different that people can add to their repertoire. This goes double if your gaming table carousel includes different GMs as well as players, and I’ll add that your great tricks will reach more roleplayers as well.

Polygamery

Not all players will play all types of games and genres, and my experience is that some groups tend to be quite selective in what they enjoy to play. Not only can you finally play that heart-(and other body parts-)wrenching game of Monsterhearts, but you can do it without the sighs of those who would rather rob the Megacorps of Night City or kill the inhabitants of the Caverns of Chaos and take their stuff. Changing up your groups opens up for bringing your Sun Tzus and butt-kickers to one game and your Elisabeth Bennets to another; for optimization of enjoyment. A wrong player might weaken the right game, but the synergies of players who truly “sing” together is a beautiful experience. Playing lots of different games means that you might even get your non-roleplaying friends to attend, because they’re so into the Russian Women’s Piloting World War II efforts or Dinosaur Princesses, bringing more people into our lovely hobby and maybe having even more intimate friendships?

Network

If you treat your table or living room as a carousel, I believe it will in time give you access to more players, multiple GMs for those burnout periods, and, as mentioned, a roster for different play experiences. A larger pool also means that your games will be less vulnerable to people relocating or otherwise becoming unavailable for play, and if you game online you might meet those friends at conventions and maybe even get to do some couch surfing? I recently had a friend lend me a proper bed and feline company for a faraway convention. Since we had experience gaming online together, I was also certain their games would give me some good gaming experiences. While I believe the benefits to yourself are clear, I also believe you’ll be doing other people a favor, introducing them both to other people and other games, and perhaps even other playstyles than they’re used to. Maybe you can help spawn new groups as well as new friendships?

Note: Friendships will endure even if a game is paused! Playing with someone else doesn’t mean you can’t do other stuff or even play one-shots with friends, and I also believe that you don’t need to game with all your gaming friends, especially if your playstyles and game interests don’t really match up that well.

Cons

Changing up the group all the time means regularly (re)establishing group lingo, forming-storming-and-norming-before-performing (optimally) and the flip-side of the new perspectives and shaking up the dynamics-coin. Safety? Not everyone will be comfortable meeting new people at their places or even bringing them home, and just needing to go to another neighbourhood or taking another bus route might be an issue, even if the group is safe itself. There’s also the dreaded FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), which I myself consider an old friend. I can honestly say that not only will it get better, but you’ll learn to be happy when your friends get to play, even when it’s without you. I understand that it can be difficult, especially if you’re not actively gaming yourself at the time. Sometimes it’s really easy to think that you’re being excluded, even though your friends have a full gaming table of people who are much more interested in the particular genre/game than you, but you’ll recognize that the sting of perception isn’t real. If you regularly change up the makeup of your own gaming table, it’s easier to understand that this is the case when you yourself aren’t asked first to that genre you don’t really like. In time you’ll learn to be happy when your friends get to play, even if you yourself are devoid of game time; because you know that soon your big roster of gaming buddies will invite you. Sometimes you and your best friend play parallel games that aren’t for each other, but that doesn’t mean you can’t meet up and talk about the different games and revel in your friend’s happiness of being in a game you wouldn’t have liked anyway.

Conclusion

I truly believe that treating your gaming table as a carousel that regulates its cast to the different experiences, both in number of players and temperament suited to different gaming experiences, will benefit both you and the other players. Maybe someone will even take up the GM mantle, since they can’t rely on you always bringing them along for the ride? Yes, it’s easier to enforce this idea if you’re always the GM, but it’s not like you couldn’t invite different GMs to GM different games either. I guess a lot of GMs would be happy to not have to deal with scheduling, and to be assured of enthusiastic and consenting players for that particular game. I also believe that if it is known that you regularly change up the cast around your table people will make more of an effort when they’re there, and others might even want to pursue a chair around your table, by inviting you to their game first.

Even though I advocate changing the cast around everyone’s gaming tables, I’ll gladly admit that my three current groups are all talking about doing another campaign after our current one ends. So am I hypocritical? Well, probably, but in this case I find it a natural development of having played with a lot of different people. You get the aforementioned roster, and you will naturally gravitate to players who like games you like and want to play more with them, and vice versa. Not only that, but you’ll also get to learn player skills, table habits and GM techniques from a lot of people, enabling yourself to become a really popular and crafty GM or player. Every now and then someone’s other life elements will leave them out of a campaign or two, or their interest just isn’t there for a project, and that’s when you’ll be happy for your big roster.

Pass it along…

Face to face, out in the heat, hanging tough, staying hungry…

                                                                                                                                             — Survivor, “Eye of the Tiger”

In a proud GM Dad moment, my eldest daughter just ran her first RPG session as a Game Master! I let her be, but stayed close enough to answer the occasional question, and by all accounts and an enthusiastic reception from her players she did a great job!

While preparing for her first session, she asked me a lot of questions. I answered them as best I could and thought that incorporating that advice into a single primer might help. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to finish this before she started running, but I thought I’d finish it anyway and put it here in the hopes that someone reading this might find it useful.

In terms of background, I’m coming at this from the POV of a Call of Cthulhu Keeper (GM), as that is what my daughter was running. Thus, my headspace was focused on investigative adventures, but I’ve tried to make the advice universally applicable.

So, without further ado…

Trust your group.

This is a big one and I think should be stated first. Unless you are running a convention game, you are probably playing with your friends, friends who understand that this is your first time taking the chair. They know that it’s a big responsibility and they’ll be willing to cut you a lot of slack. They’re happy that you’re willing to run a game for them. So, relax and don’t worry about being judged!

Note that this holds true for convention games, too. Believe it or not, many attendees who join convention games are home GMs who are happy to be players for a while. In any event, most of your players are getting used to playing with each other as much as you, so don’t think that a quiet table is an unhappy table. Everyone needs a little time to feel things out.

Expect to make mistakes.

You’re going to make mistakes, probably lots of them. But that’s okay. As a new GM, you’ve got a lot to keep track of and a responsibility to guide the session. You’re going to get tripped up here and there. Your players know that, and they’ll be fine with it. Again, they’re happy that you’re trying your hand at running!

And here’s a dirty little secret (or not so secret): we veteran GMs make mistakes too! The best advice I can give is not to hide it when you mess up. Nothing eases the stress on you like admitting that you made a mistake. If it’s something that didn’t derail the adventure, then just note the mistake and keep going. If it adversely affected the players, then compensate them and move on.

Be fair in your rulings.

While your players are going to give you their trust, it is up to you to keep it. A good way to do that is to be fair in your rulings. Note that “rulings” aren’t “rules,” they are how you run the game and apply the rules. As long as your decisions feel rational and you apply your rulings fairly, you should maintain the trust of your group.

It’s okay to take advice from your players regarding rules or rulings, but don’t let things get bogged down if a quick ruling keeps things moving. Ultimately, the rules are simply there to help you make decisions. Just make a decision for now and look up the rule after the session. You can apply the rule in the future.

Only appeal to chance when it matters.

Players generally want their characters to be competent. They don’t want to create a martial arts expert that gets easily clubbed unconscious by a purse-wielding senior or a scientist that doesn’t know basic chemistry. An easy way to do this is to simply assume competence when the act ultimately doesn’t matter or when the task seems too easy to fail. On the flip side, you can also say “no” when a character tries to do something that is obviously beyond their capabilities.

This is especially important if you’re running an investigative adventure. If your characters are investigating a crime scene, then they should be able to find any obvious clues as well as clues that they would know to look for. Nothing kills an adventure dead like the players not being able to follow leads because their character missed a skill roll to find a necessary piece of evidence!

There may be times when you’ll want the players to roll but you also need them to succeed. Keep in mind that you don’t have to make the roll a pass-fail test. It may be that if they fail, then they still succeed but draw some sort of complication. For example, if a character fails a roll on an internet search, then you may rule that they found the information only after wasting all night surfing and now they’re exhausted the next day.

Roll in the open.

This one isn’t truly necessary, as there is a long tradition of GMs rolling dice behind screens, but rolling in the open does two things. First, it fosters trust between you and your players that you are keeping things fair. Second, if you know that you’ll be rolling in the open, then you’ll also make sure that you’re only calling for rolls when you can accept the result. If you can’t, then why are you leaving it to chance?

Know the basic beats of your adventure.

Hopefully, you’ve done your prep work on your adventure. If you designed it yourself, then you’ve already internalized it. If you are using an adventure that you didn’t create, then you’ll want to read it at least twice (three is better!).

After reading the adventure, make a quick flowchart that follows the basic beats of the adventure and note where player choice matters. This flowchart doesn’t have to be very detailed, just enough to remind you of where the adventure is heading and how to guide the players back if they take their characters too far afield.

If the players need to meet a key NPC, find a crucial clue, or otherwise need a McGuffin to get to the next part of the adventure, then you’ll want to note that on the flowchart as well. That way, the flowchart will remind you of the important things you need to introduce along the way.

Keep things moving…

One of the worst things that you can do as a GM, new or veteran, is to allow the players to be stumped for too long. Sometimes what is obvious to you isn’t obvious to them, or they’ve simply discarded a clue that’s important because it doesn’t fit their theories. This can lead to unnecessary frustration.

Don’t be afraid to offer guidance. Sometimes, you can simply remind them of what they’ve found or offer suggestions to follow leads. A gentle reminder that they never visited the business on the matchbook they found, or they never thought to check the hills for the goblin encampment may be enough to get them moving without feeling like you handed it to them.

Also, don’t be afraid to end an encounter early if the conclusion is obvious. If the player characters are wiping the floor with kobolds, then you can simply say that they’ve finished them off without having to waste another 15 minutes. If an NPC isn’t going to give the players the information they want, then you don’t need to wait 10 minutes while the players keep asking questions.

…But don’t railroad.

If you’ve played RPGs for any length of time, then you’ve probably heard about the dreaded “railroad.” Simply put, railroading is whenever you take agency away from the players in situations where they believe that they should have agency. If the players are going to follow the adventure, it should be because it feels logical, or at least rational, for them to do so.

A good way to counter this is to always offer an open-ended option whenever you offer suggestions. “So, do you want to go to the business on the matchbook, follow up on Mr. Tanner’s interrogation, or do something else?” reminds the players of leads they haven’t followed but also tells them that you’re willing to go with whatever they decide.

Simplify the rules and internalize them.

Note that while I think most GMs get intimidated by the rules, I’ve made rules the lowest on the list of priorities. That’s because rules are the responsibility of everyone around the table, especially given that most out-of-game arguments during play tend to be about rules.

You don’t need to commit an entire rulebook to memory, but you should internalize the basic mechanic. Don’t worry about side cases. You can always make rulings until you’re more familiar with those rules. Just remember that point above about being fair!

In Dungeons & Dragons, for example, most tests involve rolling a d20 and adding modifiers to meet or exceed a target number. That, along with granting advantage or disadvantage, is enough for you to run a session with little trouble.

You’re supposed to be having fun, too!

This is not so much a guideline but a reminder. As a GM, you aren’t supposed to sacrifice fun; you are simply trading one type of fun for another. You get to see all the behind-the-scenes plotting, enjoy having the players interact with your adventure and make creative (and sometimes bone-headed!) decisions, play a bunch of NPCs, and overall control the flow of the adventure. It can be a blast!

Your players have a responsibility to ensure that you’re having fun, too. While there will certainly be times that a player doesn’t agree with you, they should respect your ultimate decisions. If things become too aggravating or frustrating, then it’s better to take a break or even shut down a campaign until those issues are resolved.

Wrapping Up

While taking the GM Chair can seem intimidating and even overwhelming, it doesn’t have to be. Hopefully, the advice above is helpful in showing you that it’s possible to ease into GMing and, hopefully, lead to your guiding friends through many new adventures!

And as a final (and most important) reminder, GMing is not something to be tolerated, it is meant to be enjoyed!

Game of the year?

I’ve reviewed so many other things, and I feel like I’ve been missing a fundamental item in all of this. It’s key to understanding all of my other reviews. Today, I’m going to review the process of reviewing.

I’ve literally been reviewing things from the time I was born. I remember my siblings showing me Land of the Lost, and when I saw the Sleestak for the first time, I said nope. My very first review, and a lot more succinct than I would become once I had a better vocabulary.

Disclaimer

I was not given permission to discuss the process of reviewing the review process. I have had many opinions over the years. I have not had the opportunity to see if all of my opinions are correct, although I strongly suspect they are.

Credits

Current Human Beings Varies
Popularized Reviews as Entertainment in and of Themselves Siskel and Ebert
The Internet Al Gore
The QWERTY Keyboard Christopher Latham Sholes
Modern Internet Culture Satan, probably

Popular Review Formats

Human beings review things all the time. One of the newest trends popularized by the internet is Extreme Vibes. In this technique, when you see something you like, especially if someone else doesn’t like it, you can classify it as the Best Thing Ever. Literally, it can’t be the Best Thing Ever if anything else is the Best Thing Ever, but this technique doesn’t really hinge on nuance.

There is an additional aspect to Extreme Vibes, and that is The Absolute Worst. The process goes like this:

• You dislike something
• Someone else likes it
• You realize they are wrong
• You rate it the The Absolute Worst

As with The Best Thing Ever, it is not literally possible to be The Absolute Worst. In addition to the reasons listed for The Best Thing Ever, i.e. if there is another Absolute Worst, there cannot be another Absolute Worst, so previous reviews are immediately invalidated, the Absolute Worst has another reason it remains an imprecise measure. Human beings are extremely talented at coming up with additional things that are worse than the last thing they did.

While this form of review started in the simple format of message board posts and social media responses, it has matured much like more traditional forms of review. In a move reminiscent of the sudden placement of television reviews on every news program in the 1980s, various forms of new media blossom with Extreme Vibes in video format, either in long form, as the most venerable YouTubers work with, or the more succinct micro Extreme Vibes videos that can be seen on Tik Tok.

Shooting Stars

This technique only works within the framework of another review process, specifically sites that allow you to rate a product by using symbols, often stars, but sometimes more esoteric symbols, like cupcakes, circles, or rhombuses. This is an extremely impressionist technique, even when compared to the Extreme Vibes method. The key isn’t that you need to express even your slightest tendencies as extreme antipathy or sympathy.

The real key to the Shooting Stars technique is that you put people in mind of what a review should look like, then you challenge them to engage with the review and it’s connection to the product in question in a process not unlike art appreciation. The product isn’t what’s making you feel something, the review is!

You may want an example of this. Some of the most masterful of these reviews include the following:

• Rating a product with one star, because you love it, but UPS destroyed the box, leaving you to contemplate if an author should have a star rating that incorporates frustration with a shopping company.
• Using absolute language while not engaging with either side of a scale that can measure extremes. Examples include a two star rating that cites a product as the worst thing the reviewer has encountered, or a four out of five star review that is “the best.” This leaves you contemplating the nature of extremes, and the connection between objective math and creativity.
• Writing a review that contains a long anecdote from the reviewer’s personal life, which only near the end tangentially touches on the actual merits of the item in question, or its lack of merits. This is a lesson in understanding that things need to be taken as a whole, rather than in discrete parts.

None of this should be confused with the Transcendent Narrative Review, which utilizes the review space to tell an epic story for which movie rights should be secured. The secret of the Transcendent Narrative Review is that it isn’t actually a review, but a separate artform that uses the review as its form.

Aggressive Aggregating

Probably the easiest genre of reviewing for anyone to get into. This involves logging in to a review aggregation site and clicking on a number. This is technically an advanced version of Extreme Vibes, and some reviewologists, instead of categorizing this as its own type of review, actually consider this Advanced Extreme Vibes.

I would still maintain this is a separate form of review, because in addition to the above, there is an added element of watching the aggregation percentage trending toward the direction you indicated. There is a certain anonymity to this form of reviewing that can really let someone free their inner monster. Because the key is to see the communal percentage go up or down, often reviewers in this genre will multitask by creating multiple logins for the same aggregate site, in order to express their opinions with creative resonance.

Positives

Honestly, reviewing is probably a necessary function of human beings. Without being able to express that we really do or don’t like something, reviewologists have posited that our heads would explode. They even point to some medieval tapestries that indicate peasants with exploding heads, watching the king’s favorite puppet show. It’s easy to extrapolate that their ability to provide reviews was impeded. So the big benefit to various review techniques is to keep our heads from exploding.

Negatives

Long term review work results in an effect similar to the effects that can be observed when living tissue is exposed to cosmic rays. Not the cool cosmic rays that grant superpowers, but the cosmic rays that start to melt flesh. Participating in Extreme Vibes for too long, for example, sometimes allows the reviewer’s head to explode anyway, because their opinion is forming faster than the reviewer can form words. There is also the problem of extreme isolation and listlessness for reviewers that operate in these environments and don’t use a more extreme medium like Extreme Vibes or Aggressive Aggregating, because all of the oxygen tends to be sucked out of the conversation as both extreme ends of the spectrum garner all attention.

Not Recommended–There isn’t much in this product gods forsaken process that convinces me to tell others to pick it up.

This quote doesn’t exist anywhere in the article you are reading. On one hand, that may be kind of confusing, but if you look at it this way, you’re getting new content rather than just seeing part of the article again, but bigger.

Never, ever start reviewing things. It slowly, or not so slowly, eats away at your mental health. I was normal before I started this job. Okay, that’s a lie. I never used to lie before I got this job. I’m lying about that. But it definitely changed me.

Every time you read through a product and see the love and care that went into it, and you recognize the craft employed in its creation, and you see someone say, “it’s junk,” you start to wonder if you were reading text that was only visible to you. Then you start to think, maybe it was only visible to me.

Every time you attempt to make a joke about some form of RPG that no one would ever attempt to create, some actual game arrives on the scene, either spectacularly daring the world to deny it’s genius or astounding you with the audacity to string together a mass of concepts, themes, and procedures in some simulationist echo of Frankenstein’s monster, threatening to hunt down and kill your family if you don’t make the perfect review mate for the game.

I watched SEO glitter in the dark near the Google Search Bar. All those reviews will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to join a new social media platform.

End of Line.

Editor’s Note: Jared, our review gnome, was asked to find a way to write a parody of an RPG without referencing any existing RPG properties or citing any similarities with them. Instead of that article, this was sent to us via a burner e-mail account. Jared has not been seen for the last two weeks, although the authorities believe they have a strong lead to his whereabouts.